But there is still a distinction to be clung to by those who dare not
tell themselves the truth about the medical profession because they are
so helplessly dependent on it when death threatens the household. That
distinction is the line that separates the brute from the man in the old
classification. Granted, they will plead, that we are all cruel; yet the
tame-stag-hunter does not hunt men; and the sportsman who lets a leash
of greyhounds loose on a hare would be horrified at the thought of
letting them loose on a human child. The lady who gets her cloak by
flaying a sable does not flay a negro; nor does it ever occur to her
that her veal cutlet might be improved on by a slice of tender baby.
Now there was a time when some trust could be placed in this
distinction. The Roman Catholic Church still maintains, with what it
must permit me to call a stupid obstinacy, and in spite of St. Francis
and St. Anthony, that animals have no souls and no rights; so that you
cannot sin against an animal, or against God by anything you may choose
to do to an animal. Resisting the temptation to enter on an argument as
to whether you may not sin against your own soul if you are unjust or
cruel to the least of those whom St. Francis called his little brothers,
I have only to point out here that nothing could be more despicably
superstitious in the opinion of a vivisector than the notion that
science recognizes any such step in evolution as the step from a
physical organism to an immortal soul. That conceit has been taken
out of all our men of science, and out of all our doctors, by the
evolutionists; and when it is considered how completely obsessed
biological science has become in our days, not by the full scope of
evolution, but by that particular method of it which has neither sense
nor purpose nor life nor anything human, much less godlike, in it:
by the method, that is, of so-called Natural Selection (meaning no
selection at all, but mere dead accident and luck), the folly of
trusting to vivisectors to hold the human animal any more sacred than
the other animals becomes so clear that it would be waste of time to
insist further on it. As a matter of fact the man who once concedes
to the vivisector the right to put a dog outside the laws of honor and
fellowship, concedes to him also the right to put himself outside them;
for he is nothing to the vivisector but a more highly developed, and
consequently more interesting-to-experiment-on vertebrate than the dog.