actual state of the world justify us in pronouncing life to be an
evil?” is far too vast and too solemn to be treated in this brief
paper. One remark only must be made in abatement of the wide-sweeping
denunciations of the present order of things in which Pessimists
habitually indulge. If we take count of their arguments, we shall find
that at least one-third are built on the assumption (which nothing in
genuine philosophy warrants) that the “hypothesis of a God” involves
the attribution to him not only of supreme but of _absolute_ power,
and generally of a power which includes self-contradictions. We
should sweep away no inconsiderable number of difficulties, if we
could get fairly out of reach of this ever-recurring fallacy, and
hear no more that God ought to make every creature absolutely happy,
and also absolutely virtuous; and illume the martyr’s glory, while
invariably extinguishing the martyr’s pile. And, again, another third
of the arguments of Pessimists rests on the yet more egregious and
fundamental mistake that suffering is always to be accounted an evil,
and may be lawfully weighed by them as such in holding the scales of
the world. The truth that it is “good to have been afflicted,” that
out of pain and grief and disappointment arise the purest virtues, the
tenderest sympathies, the loftiest courage, the divinest faith,--this
thrice-blessed truth, the very alphabet of spiritual experience, is,
as a rule, quite overlooked by great philosophers of the order of
Schopenhauer.
When all corrections and deductions are made, a residue of profound,
awful, inexplicable misery--misery of sinful man and misery of sinless
brutes--remains, alas! to form, doubtless, in time to come, as in
the ages which are past, the dread “Riddle of the painful Earth.” We
must expect it to press upon us ever more and more in proportion as
our sense of justice and love rises higher, and our sympathies with
unmerited suffering grow more acute. Whether the shadow which that
mystery casts on religion will hereafter be in any degree relieved by
fresh lights obtained through sounder theories of Nature, it were
idle to guess. One thing seems clear enough; namely, that the spirit
wherewith some modern Pessimists approach the tremendous problem is one
which can never lead to its solution, and which in itself is calculated
to form no inconsiderable addition to the gloom of human existence.
The world, to all who enter it, is very much what their anticipations
make of it,--full of matter for joy and gratitude, or for repining and
discontent. It appears beautiful or dreary, according as they regard
it through the cloudless, childlike eyes of cheerful trust or through
the dim and distorting spectacles of doubt and despair. No generation
so miserable has yet seen the light as one which should be trained to
expect neither justice nor love from God, and to “cultivate a connected
view of the general despicability of mankind.”
After all, as Schopenhauer himself confessed (though he cared so
little to practise the lesson), character--or, as Mr. Matthew Arnold
would say, conduct--is the great matter to which all theories are
subordinate. “Moral goodness belongs to an order of things which is
above this life, and is incommensurable with any other perfection.”
There is a certain value in the old test whereby a tree is known
by its fruits. To such of us as have kept any foundations of faith
still standing, the presumption is surely enormous that the
intellectual system which naturally produces courage, trustfulness,
and loving-kindness, must be nearer to the Eternal Verities than
the blighting theory which brings forth such thorns and thistles as
deformed the character of the great Pessimist Philosopher of the
nineteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] _Life_, p. 80.
[15] _Life_, p. 32.
[16] _Ethics_, Book IV., chap. iii.
[17] _Life_, p. 208.
[18] _Contemporary Review_, February, 1873.
[19] _Life_, p. 108.
[20] _Life_, p. 240.
ZOOPHILY.
It is a comforting reflection in a world still “full of violence and
cruel habitations” that the behavior of men to domestic animals must
have been, on the whole, more kind than the reverse. Had it been
otherwise, the “set” of the brute’s brains, according to modern theory,
would have been that of shyness and dread of us, such as is actually
exhibited by the rabbit which we chase in the field and the rat we
pursue in the cupboard. In countries where cats are exceptionally
ill-treated (_e.g._, the south of France), poor puss is almost as timid
as a hare; while the devotion and trustfulness of the dog toward man in
every land peopled by an Aryan race seem to prove that, with all our
faults, he has not found us such bad masters after all. Dogs love us,
and could only love us, because we have bestowed on them some crumbs of
love and good-will, though their generous little hearts have repaid the
debt a thousand-fold. The “Shepherd’s Chief Mourner” and “Grey Friar’s
Bobby” had probably received in their time only a few pats from the
horny hands of their masters, and a gruff word of approval when the
sheep had been particularly cleverly folded. But they recognized that
the superior being condescended to care for them, and their adoring
fidelity was the ready response.[21]
Two different motives of course have influenced men to such kindness to
domestic animals, one being obvious self-interest, and the necessity,
if they needed the creature’s services, to keep it in some degree
of health and comfort; and the other being the special affection of
individual men for favorite animals. Of the frequent manifestation of
this latter sentiment in all ages, literature and art bear repeated
testimony. We find it in the parable of Nathan; in the pictured tame
lion running beside the chariot of Rameses; in the story of Argus in
the _Odyssey_; in the episode in the _Mahabharata_, where the hero
refuses to ascend to heaven in the car of Indra without his dog; in the
exquisite passage in the _Zend-Avesta_, where the lord of good speaks
to Zoroaster, “For I have made the dog, I who am Ahura Mazda”; in the
history of Alexander’s hero, Bucephalus; in Pliny’s charming tales of
the boy and the pet dolphin, and of the poor slave thrown down the
Gemonian stairs, beside whose corpse his dog watched and wailed till
even the stern hearts of the Roman populace were melted to pity.
But neither the every-day self-interested care of animals by their
masters, nor the occasional genuine affection of special men to
favorite animals,--which have together produced the actual tameness
most of the domesticated tribes now exhibit,--seems to have led men to
the acknowledgment of moral obligation on their part toward the brutes.
As a lady will finger lovingly a bunch of flowers, and the next moment
drop it carelessly on the roadside or pluck the blossoms to pieces in
sheer thoughtlessness, so the great majority of mankind have always
treated animals.
“We tread them to death, and a troop of them dies
Without our regard or concern,”
cheerfully remarked Dr. Watts concerning ants; but he might have said
the same of our “unconcern” in the case of the cruel destruction of
thousands of harmless birds and beasts and the starvation of their
young, and of the all but universal recklessness of men in dealing with
creatures not representing value in money.
It is not, however, to be reckoned as surprising that our forefathers
did not dream of such a thing as duty to animals. They learned very
slowly that they owed duties to _men_ of other races than their own.
Only on the generation which recognized thoroughly for the first time
(thanks in great measure to Wilberforce and Clarkson) that the negro
was “a man and a brother” did it dawn that, beyond the negro, there
were other still humbler claimants for benevolence and justice. Within
a few years passed both the emancipation of the West Indian slaves
and that first act for prevention of cruelty to animals of which Lord
Erskine so truly prophesied that it would prove, “not only an honor to
the Parliament of England, but an era in the civilization of the world.”
But the noble law of England--which thus forestalled the moralists
and set an example which every civilized nation, with one solitary
exception, has followed--remains even to this day, after sixty years,
still in advance of the systematic teachers of human duty. Even while
every year sermons specially inculcating humanity to animals are
preached all over the kingdom, nobody (so far as the present writer is
aware) has attempted formally to include Duty to the Lower Animals in
any complete system of ethics as an organic part of the Whole Duty of
Man.[22]
Without pretending for a moment to fill up this gap in ethics, I would
fain offer to those who are interested in the subject a suggestion
which may possibly serve as a scaffolding till the solid edifice be
built by stronger hands. We must perchance yet wait to determine what
are the right _actions_ of man to brute; but I do not think we need
lose much time in deciding what must be the right _sentiment_, the
general feeling wherewith it is fit we should regard the lower animals.
If we can but clearly define that sentiment, it will indicate roughly
the actions which will be consonant therewith.
In the first place, it seems to me that a sense of serious
responsibility toward the brutes ought to replace our
“lady-and-the-nosegay” condition of _insouciance_. The “ages before
morality” are at an end at last, even in this remote province of human
freedom. Of all the grotesque ideas which have imposed on us in the
solemn phraseology of divines and moralists, none is more absurd than
the doctrine that our moral obligations stop short where the object of
them does not happen to know them, and assures us that, because the
brutes cannot call us to account for our transgressions, nothing that
we can do will constitute a transgression. To absolve us from paying
for a pair of boots because our bootmaker’s ledger had unluckily been
burned would be altogether a parallel lesson in morality. It is plain
enough, indeed, that the creature who is (as we assume) without a
conscience or moral arbitrament must always be exonerated from guilt,
no matter what it may do of hurt or evil; and the judicial proceedings
against, and executions of, oxen and pigs in the Middle Ages for
manslaughter were unspeakably absurd. But not less absurd, on the
other side, is it to exonerate men, who _have_ consciences and free
will, when they are guilty of cruelty to brutes, on the plea not that
_they_, but the brutes are immoral and irresponsible.[23]
A moral being is not moral on one side of him only, but moral _all
round_, and toward all who are above, beside, and beneath him: just as
a gentleman is a gentleman not only to the king, but to the peasant;
and as a truthful man speaks truth to friend and stranger. Just in
the same way, the “merciful man is merciful to his beast,” as he is
merciful to the beggar at his gate. I may add that every noble quality
is specially tested by its exhibition in those humbler directions
wherein there is nothing to be gained by showing it and nothing to be
lost by contrary behavior.
There is a passage from Jeremy Bentham, quoted in Mrs. Jamieson’s
_Commonplace Book_ and elsewhere, which will recur to many readers
at this point: “The day may come,” he says, “when the rest of the
animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been
withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. It may come one day
to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin,
or the termination of the _os sacrum_, are reasons insufficient for
abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor.... The
question is not, Can they reason? or Can they speak? but, Can they
suffer?”
Long before Bentham, a greater mind, travelling along a nobler road
of philosophy, laid down the canon which resolves the whole question.
Bishop Butler affirmed that it was on the simple fact of a creature
being SENTIENT--_i.e._, capable of pain and pleasure--that rests
our responsibility to save it pain and give it pleasure. There is
no evading this obligation, then, as regards the lower animals, by
the plea that they are not moral beings. It is _our_ morality, not
_theirs_, which is in question. There are special considerations which
in different cases may modify our obligation, but it is on such special
reasons, not on the universal non-moral nature of the brutes (as the
old divines taught), that our exoneration must be founded; and the onus
lies on us to show cause for each of them.
The distinction between our duties to animals and our duties to our
human fellow-creatures lies here. As regards them both, we are indeed
forbidden to inflict avoidable pain, because both alike are sentient.
But, as regards the brutes, our duties _stop_ there: whereas, as
regards men, they being moral as well as sentient beings, our primary
obligations toward them must concern their higher natures, and include
the preservation of the lives which those higher natures invest with a
sanctity exclusively their own. Thus, we reach the important conclusion
that the infliction of avoidable pain is the supreme offence as regards
the lower animals, but _not_ the supreme offence as regards man. Sir
Henry Taylor’s noble lines go to the very root of the question:--
“Pain, terror, mortal agonies, which scare
Thy heart in man, to brutes thou wilt not spare.
Are theirs less sad and real? _Pain in man
Bears the high mission of the flail and fan;
In brutes, ’tis purely piteous._”
Pain is the one supreme evil of the existence of the lower animals, an
evil which (so far as we can see) has no countervailing good. As to
death, a painless one--so far from being the supreme evil to them--is
often the truest mercy. Thus, instead of the favorite phrase of certain
physiologists, that “they would put hecatombs of brutes to torture to
save the smallest pain of a man,” true ethics bids us regard man’s
_moral_ welfare only as of supreme importance, and anything which can
injure _it_ (such, for example, as the practice, or sanction of the
practice, of cruelty) as the worst of evils, even if along with it
should come a mitigation of bodily pain. On this subject, the present
Bishop of Winchester has put the case in a nutshell. “It is true,” he
said, “that man is superior to the beast, but the part of man which
we recognize as such is his moral and spiritual nature. So far as his
body and its pains are concerned, there is no particular reason for
considering them more than the body and bodily pains of a brute.”
Of course, the ground is cut from under us in this whole line of
argument by those ingenious thinkers who have recently disinterred
(with such ill-omened timeliness for the vivisection debate) Descartes’
supposed doctrine, that the appearance of pain and pleasure in the
brutes is a mere delusion, and that they are only automata,--“a
superior kind of marionettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without
pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence as
a bee simulates a mathematician.” If this conclusion, on which modern
science is to be congratulated, be accepted, it follows, of course,
that we should give no more consideration to the fatigue of a noble
hunter than to the creaking wood of a rocking-horse; and that the
emotions a child bestows on its doll will be more serious than those
we bestow on a dog who dies of grief on his master’s grave. Should it
appear to us, however, on the contrary (as it certainly does to me),
that there is quite as good evidence that dogs and elephants reason
as that certain physiologists reason, and a great deal better evidence
that they--the animals--feel, we may perhaps dismiss the Cartesianism
of the nineteenth century, and proceed without further delay to
endeavor to define more particularly the fitting sentiment of man to
sentient brutes. We have seen we ought to start with a distinct sense
of some degree of moral responsibility as regards them. What shape
should that sense assume?
We have been in the habit of indulging ourselves in all manner
of antipathies to special animals, some of them having, perhaps,
their source and _raison d’être_ in the days of our remote but not
illustrious ancestors,
“When wild in woods the noble savage ran”;
or those of a still earlier date, who were, as Mr. Darwin says,
“arboreal in their habits,” ere yet we had deserved the reproach of
having “made ourselves tailless and hairless and multiplied folds
to our brain.” Other prejudices, again, are mere personal whims,
three-fourths of them being pure affectation. A man will decline to sit
in a room with an inoffensive cat, and a lady screams at the sight of
a mouse, which is infinitely more distressed at the _rencontre_ than
she. I have known an individual, otherwise distinguished for audacity,
“make tracks” across several fields to avoid a placidly ruminating
cow. In our present stage of civilization, these silly prejudices
are barbarisms and anachronisms, if not vulgarisms, and should be
treated like exhibitions of ignorance or childishness. For our remote
progenitors before mentioned, tusky and hirsute, struggling for
existence with the cave bear and the mammoth in the howling wilderness
of a yet uncultured world, there was no doubt justification for
regarding the terrible beasts around them with the hatred which comes
of fear. But the animal creation, at least throughout Europe, has been
subdued for ages; and all its tribes are merely dwellers by sufferance
in a vanquished province. Their position as regards us appeals to
every spark of generosity alight in our bosoms, and ought to make us
ashamed of our whims and antipathies toward beings so humble. Shall man
arrogate the title of “lord of creation,” and not show himself, at the
least, _bon prince_ to his poor subjects? It is not too much to ask
that, even toward wild animals, our feelings should be those of royal
clemency and indulgence,--of pleasure in the beauty and grace of such
of them as are beautiful; of admiration for their numberless wondrous
instincts; of sympathy with their delight in the joys of the forest and
the fields of air. Few, I suppose, of men with any impressionability
can watch a lark ascending into the sky of a summer’s morning without
some dim echo of the feelings which inspired Shelley’s Ode. This is,
however, only a specially vivid instance of a sympathy which might be
almost universal, and which, so far as we learn to feel it, touches all
nature for us with a magic wand.
If we are compelled to fight with them, if they are our natural
enemies and can never be anything else, then let us wage war upon them
in loyal sort, as we contended against the Russians at Balaklava;
and, if we catch any prisoners, deal with them chivalrously or at
least mercifully. This, indeed (to do justice to sportsmen, much as
I dislike their pursuit), I have always observed to be the spirit of
the old-fashioned country gentleman, before the gross slaughtering of
_battues_ and despicable pigeon-matches were heard of in the land.
As to domestic animals, their demands on us, did we read them aright,
are not so much those of petitioners for mercy as of rightful claimants
of justice. We have caused their existence, and are responsible that
they should be on the whole happy and not miserable. We take their
services to carry our burdens, to enhance our pleasures, to guard
our homes and our flocks. In the case of many of them, we accept the
fondest fidelity and an affection such as human beings scarcely give
once in a lifetime. They watch for us, work for us, bear often weary
imprisonment and slavery in our service, and not seldom mourn for us
with breaking hearts when we die. If we conceive of an arbiter sitting
by and watching alike our behavior and the poor brutes’ toil and love,
can we suppose he would treat it as merely a piece of _generosity_ on
our part, which we were free to leave unfulfilled without blame, that
we should behave considerately to such an humble friend, supply him
with food, water, and shelter, forbear to overwork him, and end his
harmless life at last with the least possible pain? Would he not demand
it of us as the simplest matter of _justice_?[24]
For those who accept the Darwinian theory, and believe that the
relationship between man and the brutes is not only one of similarity,
but of actual kinship in blood, it would have seemed only natural that
this new view should have brought forth a burst of fresh sympathy and
tenderness. If our physical frames, with all their quivering nerves and
susceptibilities to a thousand pains, be, indeed, only the four-footed
creature’s body a little modified by development; if our minds only
overlap and transcend theirs, but are grown out of those humbler
brains; if all our moral qualities, our love and faith and sense of
justice, be only their affection and fidelity and dim sense of wrong
extended into wider realms,--then we bear in ourselves the irresistible
testimony to their claims on our sympathy. And if, like so many of the
disciples of the same new philosophy, we are unhappy enough to believe
that both man and brute when laid in the grave awake no more, then,
above all, it would seem that this common lot of a few pleasures and
many pains, to be followed by annihilation, would move any heart to
compassion. In the great, silent, hollow universe in which these souls
believe themselves to stand, how base does it seem to turn on the
weaker, unoffending beings around them, and spoil their little gleam of
life and joy under the sun!
Nothing is more startling to me than the fact that some of the leading
apostles of this philosophy, and even its respected author himself,
should in one and the same breath tell us that an ape, for example, is
actually our own flesh and blood, and that it is right and proper to
treat apes after the fashion of Professors Munk and Goltz and Ferrier.
These gentlemen, as regards the poor _quadrumana_, are rather “more
than kin,” and rather “less than kind.”
For those who, whether they believe in evolution or not, still hold
faith in the existence of a divine Lord of man and brute, the reasons
for sympathy are, in another way, still stronger. That the Christian
religion did not, from the first, like the Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and
Brahminist, impress its followers with the duty of mercy to the brutes;
that it was left to a few tender-hearted saints, like St. Francis, to
connect the creatures in any way with the worship of the Creator, and
to the later development of Protestantism to formulate any doctrine
on the subject of duty toward them,--is a paradox which would need
much space to explain. Modern religion, at all events, by whatever
name it is called, seems tending more and more to throw an additional
tender sacredness over our relations to the “unoffending creatures
which he,” their Maker, “loves,” and to make us recognize a latent
truth in the curiously hackneyed lines of Coleridge concerning him who
“prayeth best” and also loveth best “both man and bird and beast.”
Where that great and far-reaching softener of hearts, the sense of our
own failures and offences, is vividly present, the position we hold to
creatures who _have never done wrong_ is always found inexpressibly
touching. To be kind to them and rejoice in their happiness seems
just one of the few ways in which we can act a god-like part in our
little sphere, and display the mercy for which we hope in our turn.
Whichever way we take it, I conceive we reach the same conclusion. The
only befitting feeling for human beings to entertain toward brutes is,
as the very word suggests, the feeling of _humanity_: or, as we may
interpret it, the sentiment of sympathy, so far as we can cultivate
fellow-feeling; of pity, so far as we know them to suffer; of mercy, so
far as we can spare their sufferings; of kindness and benevolence, so
far as it is in our power to make them happy.
There is nothing fanatical about this humanity. It does not call on us
to renounce any of the useful or needful avocations of life as regards
animals, but rather would it make the man imbued with it perform them
all the better.[25] We assuredly need not, because we become humane,
sacrifice the higher life for the lower, as in the wondrous Buddhist
parable so beautifully rendered in the _Light of Asia_, where “Lord
Buddha,” in one of his million lives, gives himself, out of pity, to
be devoured by a famishing tiger who cannot feed her cubs, and
“The great cat’s burning breath
Mixed with the last sigh of such fearless love.”
We need not even copy the sweet lady in the “Sensitive Plant” who made
the bees and moths and ephemeridæ her attendants:--
“But all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore in a basket of Indian woof
Into the rough woods far aloof,--
“In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.”