Chapter I: WAS looking idly at the motley Damascus crowd behind whose outward (2)

In such a time it was a psychological certainty that among the other Eastern ideas which were coming to the fore, would be those ideas about animals which are roughly classed under the head of Pythagoreanism. The apostles of Christ in their journeys East or West might have met a singular individual who was carrying on an apostolate of his own, the one clear and unyielding point of which was the abolition of animal sacrifices. This was Apollonius, of Tyana, our knowledge of whom is derived from the biography, in part perhaps fanciful, written by Philostratus in the third century to please the Empress Julia Domna, who was interested in occult matters. Apollonius worked wonders as well attested as those, for instance, of the Russian Father John, but he seems to have considered his power the naturally produced result of an austere life and abstinence from flesh and wine which is a thoroughly Buddhist or Jaina theory. He was a theosophist who refrained from attacking the outward forms and observances of established religion when they did not seem to him either to be cruel or else incongruous to the degree of preventing a reverential spirit. He did not entirely understand that this degree is movable, any more than do those persons who want to substitute Gregorian chants for opera airs in rural Italian churches. He did not mind the Greek statues which appealed to the imagination by suggestions of beauty, but he blamed the Egyptians for representing deity as a dog or an ibis; if they disliked images of stone why not have a temple where there were no images of any kind—where all was left to the inner vision of the worshipper? In which question, almost accidentally, Apollonius throws out a hint of the highest form of spiritual worship.

_Photo:_ _Alinari._
LAMBS.
(_Relief on fifth century tomb at Ravenna._)]

The keenly intellectual thinkers whom we call the Fathers of the Church saw that the majority of the ideas then agitating men’s minds might find a quietus in Christian dogma which suited them a great deal better than the vague and often grotesque shape they had worn hitherto. But there was a residuum of which they felt an instinctive fear, and peculiar notions about animals had the ill-luck of being placed at the head of these. It could not have been a fortunate coincidence that two of the most prominent men who held them in the early centuries were declared foes of the new faith—Celsus and Porphyry.

When the Church triumphed, the treatise written by Celsus would have been no doubt entirely destroyed like other works of the same sort, had not Origen made a great number of quotations from it for the purpose of confutation. Celsus was no _borné_ disputant after the fashion of the Octavius of Minucius, but a man of almost encyclopædic learning; if he was a less fair critic than he held himself to be, it was less from want of information than from want of that sympathy which is needful for true comprehension. The inner feeling of such a man towards the Christian Sectaries was not near so much that of a Torquemada in regard to heretics as that of an old-fashioned Tory upholder of throne and altar towards dissent fifty years ago. It was a feeling of social aloofness.

Yet Celsus wished to be fair, and he had studied religions to enough purpose not to condemn as delusion or untruth everything that a superficial adversary would have rejected at once; for instance, he was ready to allow that the appearances of Christ to His disciples after the Crucifixion might be explained as psychical phenomena. Possibly he believed that truth, not falsehood, was the ultimate basis of all religions as was the belief of Apollonius before him. In some respects Celsus was more unprejudiced than Apollonius; this can be observed in his remarks on Egyptian zoomorphism; it causes surprise, he says, when you go inside one of the splendid Egyptian temples to find for divinity a cat, a monkey or a crocodile, but to the initiated they are symbols which under an allegorical veil turn people to honour imperishable ideas, not perishable animals as the vulgar suppose.

It may have been his recondite researches which led Celsus to take up the question of the intelligence of animals and the conclusions to be drawn from it. He only touches lightly on the subject of their origin; he seems to lean towards the theory that the soul, life, mind, only, is made by God, the corruptible and passing body being a natural growth or perhaps the handiwork of inferior spirits. He denied that reason belonged to man alone, and still more strongly that God created the universe for man rather than for the other animals. Only absurd pride, he says, can engender such a thought. He knew very well that this, far from being a new idea, was the normal view of the ancient world from Aristotle to Cicero; the distinguished men who disagreed with it had never won more than a small minority over to their opinion. Celsus takes Euripides to task for saying—

“The sun and moon are made to serve mankind.”

Why mankind? he asks; why not ants and flies? Night serves them also for rest and day for seeing and working. If it be said that we are the king of animals because we hunt and catch them or because we eat them, why not say that we are made for them because they hunt and catch us? Indeed, they are better provided than we, for while we need arms and nets to take them and the help of several men and dogs, Nature furnishes them with the arms they require, and we are, as it were, made dependent on them. You want to make out that God gave you the power to take and kill wild animals, but at the time when there were no towns or civilisation or society or arms or nets, animals probably caught and devoured men while men never caught animals. In this way, it looks more as if God subjected man to animals than _vice versâ_. If men seem different from animals because they build cities, make laws, obey magistrates and rulers, you ought to note that this amounts to nothing at all, since ants and bees do just the same. Bees have their “kings”; some command, others obey; they make war, win battles, take prisoner the vanquished; they have their towns and quarters; their work is regulated by fixed periods, they punish the lazy and cowardly—at least they expel the drones. As to ants, they practise the science of social economy just as well as we do; they have granaries which they fill with provisions for the winter; they help their comrades if they see them bending under the weight of a burden; they carry their dead to places which become family tombs; they address each other when they meet: whence it follows that they never lose their way. We must conclude, therefore, that they have complete reasoning powers and common notions of certain general truths, and that they have a language and know how to express fortuitous events. If some one, then, looked down from the height of heaven on to the earth, what difference would he see between our actions and those of ants and bees? If man is proud of knowing magical secrets, serpents and eagles know a great deal more, for they use many preservatives against poisons and diseases, and are acquainted with the virtues of certain stones with which they cure the ailments of their young ones, while if men find out such a cure they think they have hit on the greatest wonder in the world. Finally, if man imagines that he is superior to animals because he possesses notion of God, let him know that it is the same with many of them; what is there more divine, in fact, than to foresee and to foretell the future? Now for that purpose men have recourse to animals, especially to birds, and all our soothsayers do is to understand the indications given by these. If, therefore, birds and other prophetic animals show us by signs the future as it is revealed to them by God, it proves that they have closer relations with the deity than we; that they are wiser and more loved by God. Very enlightened men have thought that they understood the language of certain animals, and in proof of this they have been known to predict that birds would do something or go somewhere, and this was observed to come true. No one keeps an oath more religiously or is more faithful to God than the elephant, which shows that he knows Him.

Hence, concludes Celsus, the universe has _not_ been made for man any more than for the eagle or the dolphin. Everything was created not in the interest of something else, but to contribute to the harmony of the whole in order that the world might be absolutely perfect. God takes care of the universe; it is that which His providence never forsakes, that which never falls into disorder. God no more gets angry with men than with rats or monkeys: everything keeps its appointed place.

In this passage Celsus rises to a higher level than in any other of the excerpts preserved for us by Origen. The tone of irony which usually characterises him disappears in this dignified affirmation of supreme wisdom justified of itself not by the little standards of men—or ants. It must be recognised as a lofty conception, commanding the respect of those who differ from it, and reconciling all apparent difficulties and contradictions forced upon us by the contemplation of men and Nature. But it brings no water from the cool spring to souls dying of thirst; it expounds in the clearest way and even in the noblest way the very thought which drove men into the Christian fold far more surely than the learned apologies of controversialists like Origen; the thought of the crushing unimportance of the individual.

The least attentive reader must be struck by the real knowledge of natural history shown by Celsus: his ants are nearly as conscientiously observed as Lord Avebury’s. Yet a certain suspicion of conscious exaggeration detracts from the seriousness of his arguments; he strikes one as more sincere in disbelieving than in believing. A modern writer has remarked that Celsus in the second half of the second century forestalled Darwin in the second half of the nineteenth by denying human ascendancy and contending that man may be a little lower than the brute. But it scarcely seems certain whether he was convinced by his own reasoning or was not rather replying by paradoxes to what he considered the still greater paradoxes of Christian theology.

The shadow of no such doubt falls on the pages of the neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry. To them the destiny of animals was not an academic problem but an obsession. The questions which Heine’s young man asked of the waves: “What signifies man? Whence does he come? Whither does he go?” were asked by them with passionate earnestness in their application to all sentient things. Plotinus reasoned, with great force, that intelligent beast-souls must be like the soul of man since in itself the essence of the soul could not be different. Porphyry (born at Tyre, A.D. 233), accepting this postulate that animals possess an intelligent soul like ours, went on to declare that it was therefore unlawful to kill or feed on them under any circumstances. If justice is due to rational beings, how is it possible to evade the conclusion that we are also bound to act justly towards the races below us? He who loves all animated nature will not single out one tribe of innocent beings for hatred; if he loves the whole he will love every part, and, above all, that part which is most closely allied to ourselves. Porphyry was quite ready to admit that animals in their own way made use of words, and he mentions Melampus and Apollonius as among the philosophers who understood their language. He quoted with approval the laws supposed to have been framed by Triptolemus in the reign of Pandion, fifth king of Athens: “Honour your parents; make oblations of your fruits to the gods; hurt not any living creature.”

Neoplatonism penetrated into the early Church, but divested of its views on animal destiny; even the Catholic neoplatonist Boëthius, though he was sensitively fond of animals (witness his lines about caged birds), yet took the extreme view of the hard-and-fast line of separation, as may be seen by his poem on the “downward head,” which he interpreted to indicate the earth-bound nature of all flesh save man. Birds, by the by, and even fishes, not to speak of camel-leopards, can hardly be said to have a “downward head.” Meanwhile, the other manner of feeling, if not of thinking, reasserted its power as it always will, for it belongs to the primal things. Excluded from the broad road, it came in by the narrow way—the way that leads to heaven. In the wake of the Christian Guru came a whole troop of charming beasts, little less saintly and miraculous than their holy protectors, and thus preachers of the religion of love were spared the reproach of showing an all-unloving face towards creatures that could return love for love as well as most and better than many of the human kind. The saint saved the situation, and the Church wisely left him alone to discourse to his brother fishes or his sister turtle-doves, without inquiring about the strict orthodoxy of the proceeding.

Unhappily the more direct inheritors of neoplatonist dreams were not left alone. A trend of tendency towards Pythagoreanism runs through their different developments from Philo to the Gnostics, from the Gnostics, through the Paulicians to the Albigenses. It passes out of our sight when these were suppressed in the thirteenth century by the most sanguinary persecution that the world has seen, but before long it was to reappear in one shape or another, and we may be sure that the thread was never wholly lost.

“IL BUON PASTORE.”
(_Mosaic at Ravenna._)]

An effort has been made to prove that the official as well as the unofficial Church always favoured humanity to animals. The result of this effort has been wholly good; not only has it produced a delightful volume,[10] but, indirectly, it was the cause of Pope Pius X. pronouncing a blessing on every one who is working for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the world. _Roma locuta est._ To me this appears to be a landmark in ethics of first-class importance. Nevertheless, historically speaking, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the diametrically opposite view expressed by Father Rickaby in a manual intended for use in the Jesuit College at Stonyhurst,[11] more correctly gives the measure of what had been the practical teaching of the Church in all these ages. Even now, authoritative Catholics, when enjoining humanity to animals, are careful to add that man has “no duties” towards them, though they may modify this by saying with Cardinal Manning (the most kind-hearted of men) that he owes “a sevenfold obligation” to their Creator to treat them well. Was it surprising that the Neapolitan peasant who heard from his priest that he had no duties to his ass went home, not to excogitate the sevenfold obligation but to belabour the poor beast soundly? Though the distinction is capable of philosophical defence, granted the premises, to plain people it looks like a juggling with words. When St. Philip Neri said to a monk who put his foot on a lizard, “What has the poor creature done to you?” he implied a duty to the animal, the duty of reciprocity. He spoke with the voice of Nature and forgot, for the moment, that animals were not “moral persons” nor “endowed with reason,” and that hence they could have “no rights.”

Footnote 10:

“L’Église et la Pitié envers les animaux,” Paris, 1903. An English
edition has been published by Messrs. Burns and Oates.

Footnote 11:

“Moral Philosophy,” p. 250.

At an early date, in the heart of official Catholicism, an inconsistency appeared which is less easily explained than homilies composed for fishes or hymns for birds; namely, the strange business of animal prosecutions. Without inquiring exactly what an animal is, it is easy to bestow upon it either blessings or curses. The beautiful rite of the blessing of the beasts which is still performed once a year in many places involves no doctrinal crux. In Corsica the priest goes up to the high mountain _plateaux_ where the animals pasture in the summer, and after saying Mass in presence of all the four-footed family, he solemnly blesses them and exhorts them to prosper and multiply. It is a delightful scene, but it does not affect the conception of the moral status of animals, nor would that conception be affected by a right-down malediction or order to quit. What, however, can be thought of a regular trial of inconvenient or offending animals in which great care is taken, to keep up the appearance of fair-play to the defendants? Our first impression is, that it must be an elaborate comedy; but a study of the facts makes it impossible to accept this theory.

The earliest allusions to such trials that seem to exist belong to the ninth century, which does not prove that they were the first of the kind. One trial took place in 824 A.D. The Council of Worms decided in 866 that if a man has been killed by bees they ought to suffer death, “but,” added the judgment, “it will be permissible to eat their honey.” A relic of the same order of ideas lingers in the habit some people have of shooting a horse which has caused a fatal accident, often the direct consequence of bad riding or bad driving. The earlier beast trials of which we have knowledge were conducted by laymen, the latter by ecclesiastics, which suggests their origin in a folk-practice. A good, characteristic instance began on September 5, 1370. The young son of a Burgundian swineherd had been killed by three sows which seemed to have feared an attack on one of their young ones. All members of the herd were arrested as accomplices, which was a serious matter to their owners, the inmates of a neighbouring convent, as the animals, if convicted, would be burnt and their ashes buried. The prior pointed out that three sows alone were guilty; surely the rest of the pigs ought to be acquitted. Justice did not move quickly in those times; it was on September 12, 1379, that the Duke of Burgundy delivered judgment; only the three guilty sows and one young pig (what had _it_ done?) were to be executed; the others were set at liberty “notwithstanding that they had seen the death of the boy without defending him.” Were the original ones all alive after nine years? If so, would so long a respite have been granted them had no legal proceedings been instituted?

An important trial took place in Savoy in the year 1587. The accused was a certain fly. Two suitable advocates were assigned to the insects, who argued on their behalf that these creatures were created before man, and had been blessed by God, who gave them the right to feed on grass, and for all these and other good reasons the flies were in their right when they occupied the vineyards of the Commune; they simply availed themselves of a legitimate privilege conformable to Divine and natural law. The plaintiffs’ advocate retorted that the Bible and common sense showed animals to be created for the utility of man; hence they could not have the right to cause him loss, to which the counsel for the insects replied that man had the right to command animals, no doubt, but not to persecute, excommunicate and interdict them when they were merely conforming to natural law “which is eternal and immutable like the Divine.”

The judges were so deeply impressed by this pleading that to cut the case short, which seemed to be going against him, the Mayor of St. Julien hastened to propose a compromise; he offered a piece of land where the flies might find a safe retreat and live out their days in peace and plenty. The offer was accepted. On June 29, 1587, the citizens of St. Julien were bidden to the market square by ringing the church bells, and after a short discussion they ratified the agreement which handed over a large piece of land to the exclusive use of the insects. Hope was expressed that they would be entirely satisfied with the bargain. A right of way across the land was, indeed, reserved to the public, but no harm whatever was to be done to the flies on their own territory. It was stated in the formal contract that the reservation was ceded to the insects in perpetuity.

All was going well, when it transpired that, in the meantime, the flies’ advocates had paid a visit to that much-vaunted piece of land, and when they returned, they raised the strongest objection to it on the score that it was arid, sterile, and produced nothing. The mayor’s counsel disputed this; the land, he said, produced no end of nice small trees and bushes, the very things for the nutrition of insects. The judges intervened by ordering a survey to find out the real truth, which survey cost three florins. There, alas! the story ends, for the winding up of the affair is not to be found in the archives of St. Julien.

Records of 144 such trials have come to light. Of the two I have described, it will be remarked that one belongs, as it were, to criminal and the other to civil law. The last class is the most curious. No doubt the trial of flies or locusts was resorted to when other means of getting rid of them had failed; it was hoped, somehow, that the elaborate appearance of fair-play would bring about a result not to be obtained by violence. We can hardly resist the inference that they involved some sort of recognition or intuition of animals’ rights and even of animal intelligence.

In the dawn of modern literature animals played a large, though artificial, part which must not be quite ignored on account of its artificiality, because in the Bestiaries as in the Æsopic and Oriental fables from which they were mainly derived, there was an inextricable tangle of observations of the real creature and arbitrary ascription to him of human qualities and adventures. At last they became a mere method for attacking political or ecclesiastical abuses, but their great popularity was as much due to their outer as to their inner sense. There is not any doubt that at the same time floods of Eastern fairy-tales were migrating to Europe, and in these the most highly appreciated hero was always the friendly beast. In a romance of the thirteenth century called “Guillaume de Palerme” all previous marvels of this kind were outdone by the story of a Sicilian prince who was befriended by a were-wolf!

It is not generally remembered that the Indian or Buddhist view of animals must have been pretty well known in Europe at least as early as the fourteenth century. The account of the monastery “where many strange beasts of divers kinds do live upon a hill,” which Fra Odoric, of Pordenone, dictated in 1330, is a description, both accurate and charming, of a Buddhist animal refuge, and in the version given of it in Mandeville’s “Travels,” if not in the original, it must have been read by nearly every one who could read, for no book ever had so vast a diffusion as the “Travels” of the elusive Knight of St. Albans.

With the Italian Renaissance came the full modern æsthetic enjoyment of animals; the admiration of their beauty and perfection which had been appreciated, of course, long before, but not quite in the same spirit. The all-round gifted Leo Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century took the same critical delight in the points of a fine animal that a modern expert would take. He was a splendid rider, but his interest was not confined to horses; his love for his dog is shown by his having pronounced a funeral oration over him. We feel that with such men humanity towards animals was a part of good manners. “We owe justice to men,” said the intensely civilised Montaigne, “and grace and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it; there is a natural commerce and mutual obligation between them and us.” Sir Arthur Helps, speaking of this, called it “using courtesy to animals,” and when one comes to think of it, is not such “courtesy” the particular mark and sign of a man of good breeding in all ages?

The Renaissance brought with it something deeper than a wonderful quickening of the æsthetic sense in all directions; it also brought that spiritual quickening which is the co-efficient of every really upward movement of the human mind. Leonardo da Vinci, greatest of artist-humanists, inveighed against cruelty in words that might have been written by Plutarch or Porphyry. His sympathies were with the vegetarian. Meanwhile, Northern Churchmen who went to Rome were scandalised to hear it said in high ecclesiastical society that there was no difference between the souls of men and beasts. An attempt was made to convert Erasmus to this doctrine by means of certain extracts from Pliny. Roman society, at that time, was so little serious that one cannot believe it to have been serious even in its heterodoxy. But speculations more or less of the same sort were taken up by men of a very different stamp; it was to be foreseen that animals would have their portion of attention in the ponderings of the god-intoxicated musers who have been called the Sceptics of the Renaissance. For the proof that they did receive it we have only to turn to the pages of Giordano Bruno. “Every part of creation has its share in being and cognition.” “There is a difference, not in quality, but in quantity, between the soul of man, the animal and the plant.” “Among horses, elephants and dogs there are single individuals which appear to have almost the understanding of men.”

Bruno’s prophetic guess that instinct is inherited habit might have saved Descartes (who was much indebted to the Nolan) from giving his name an unenviable immortality in connexion with the theory which is nearly all that the ignorant know now of Cartesian philosophy. This was the theory that animals are automata, a sophism that may be said to have swept Europe, though it was not long before it provoked a reaction. Descartes got this idea from the very place where it was likely to originate, from Spain. A certain Gomez Pereira advanced it before Descartes made it his own, which even led to a charge of plagiarism. “Because a clock marks time and a bee makes honey, we are to consider the clock and the bee to be machines. Because they do one thing better than man and no other thing so well as man, we are to conclude that they have no mind, but that Nature acts within them, holding their organs at her disposal.” “Nor are we to think, as the ancients do, that animals speak, though we do not know their language, for, if that were so, they, having several organs related to ours, might as easily communicate with us as with each other.”

About this, Huxley showed that an almost imperceptible imperfection of the vocal chord may prevent articulated sounds. Moreover, the click of the bushmen, which is almost their only language, is exceedingly like the sounds made by monkeys.

Language, as defined by an eminent Italian man of science, Professor Broca, is the faculty of making things known, or expressing them by signs or sounds. Much the same definition was given by Mivart, and if there be a better one, we have still to wait for it. Human language is evolved; at one time man had it not. The babe in the cradle is without it; the deaf mute, in his untaught state, is without it; _ergo_ the babe and the deaf mute cannot feel. Poor babes and poor deaf mutes should the scientific Loyolas of the future adopt this view!

I do not know if any one has remarked that rural and primitive folk can never bring themselves to believe of any foreign tongue that it is real human language like their own. To them it seems a jargon of meaningless and uncouth sounds.

Chanet, a follower of Descartes, said that he would believe that beasts thought when a beast told him so. By what cries of pain, by what looks of love, have not beasts told men that they thought! Man himself does not think in words in moments of profound emotion, whether of grief or joy. _He cries out_ or he _acts_. Thought in its absolutely elementary form is _action_. The mother thinks in the kiss she gives her child. The musician thinks in music. Perhaps God thinks in constellations. I asked a man who had saved many lives by jumping into the sea, “What did you think of at the moment of doing it?” He replied: “You do not think, or you might not do it.”

The whole trend of philosophic speculation worthy of the name lies towards unity, but the Cartesian theory would arbitrarily divide even man’s physical and sensational nature from that of the other animals. To remedy this, Descartes admitted that man was just as much an automatic machine as other creatures. By what right, then, does he complain when he happens to have a toothache? Because, says Descartes triumphantly, man has an immortal soul! The child thinks in his mother’s womb, but the dog, which after scenting two roads takes the third without demur, sure that his master must have gone that way, this dog is acting “by springs” and neither thinks nor feels at all.

The misuse of the ill-treated word “Nature” cannot hide the fact that the beginning, middle, and end of Descartes’ argument rests on a perpetually recurrent miracle. Descartes confessed as much when he said that God _could_ make animals as machines, so why should it be impossible that He _had_ made them as machines? Voltaire’s clear reason revolted at this logic; he declared it to be absurd to imagine that God had given animals organs of feeling in order that they might _not_ feel. He would have endorsed Professor Romanes’ saying that “the theory of animal automatism which is usually attributed to Descartes can never be accepted by common sense.”

On the other hand, while Descartes was being persecuted by the Church for opinions which he did _not_ hold, this particular opinion of his was seized upon by Catholic divines as a vindication of creation. Pascal so regarded it. The miraculous element in it did not disturb him. Malebranche said though opposed by reason it was approved by faith.

Descartes said that the idea that animals think and feel is a relic of childhood. The idea that they do _not_ think and feel might be more truly called a relic of that darkest side of perverse childhood, the existence of which we are all fain to forget. Whoever has seen a little child throwing stones at a toad on the highway—and sad because his hands are too small to take up the bigger stones to throw—will understand what I mean. I do not wish to allude more than slightly to a point which is of too much importance to pass over in silence. Descartes was a vivisector: so were the pious people at Port Royal who embraced his teaching with enthusiasm, and liked to hear the howls of the dogs they vivisected. M. Émile Ferrière, in his work “L’âme est la fonction du cerveau,” sees in the “souls” of beasts exactly the same nature as in the “soul” of man; the difference, he maintains, is one of degree; though generally inferior, it is sometimes superior to “souls” of certain human groups. Here is a candid materialist who deserves respect. But there is a school of physiologists nowadays which carries on an unflagging campaign in favour of belief in unconscious animal machines which work by springs, while denying that there is a God to wind up the springs, and in conscious human machines, while denying that there is a soul, independent of matter, which might account for the difference. “The wish is father to the thought.” _Non ragionam di lor ma guarda e passa._

The strongest of all reasons for dismissing the machine theory of animals is their variety of idiosyncrasy. It is said that to the shepherd no two sheep look alike; it is certain that no two animals of any kind have the same characters. Some are selfish, some are unselfish, some are gentle, some irretrievably ill-tempered both to each other and to man. Some animals do not show much regret at the loss of their offspring, with others it is manifestly the reverse. Édouard Quinet described how on one occasion, when visiting the lions’ cage in the Jardin des Plantes, he observed the lion gently place his large paw on the forehead of the lioness, and so they remained, grave and still, all the time he was there. He asked Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who was with him, what it meant. “Their lion cub,” was the answer, “died this morning.” “Pity, benevolence, sympathy, could be read on those rugged faces.” That these qualities are often absent in sentient beings what man can doubt? But they are not to be found in the best mechanical animals in all Nuremberg!

Nor do machines commonly act as did the dog in the following true story which relates to something that happened during the earthquake of Ash Wednesday, 1887. At a place called Ceriana on the Italian Riviera a poor man who earned his living as a milk-carrier was supposed to have gone on his ordinary rounds, on which he was used to start at four o’clock in the morning. No one, therefore, thought of inquiring about him, but the fact was, that having taken a glass or two of wine in honour of the last night of the Carnival, he had overslept himself, and was still asleep when his cottage fell down upon him. He had a large dog which drew the little cart bearing the milk up the mountain paths, and the dog by chance was outside and safe. He found out where his master lay and succeeded in clearing the masonry so as to uncover his head, which was bleeding. He then set to work to lick the wounds; but, seeing that they went on bleeding, and also that he could not liberate the rest of the body, he started in search of help, running up and down among the surrounding ruins till he met some one, whom he caught hold of by the clothes. The man, however, thought that the dog was mad and fled for his life. Luckily, another man guessed the truth and allowed himself to be guided to the spot. History repeats itself, at least the history of devoted dogs. The same thing happened after the greater earthquake at Messina, when a man, one of the last to be saved, was discovered through the insistence of his little dog, who approached a group of searchers and whined piteously till he persuaded them to follow him to the ruins which concealed his master.

Nor, again, do machines act like a cockatoo I heard of from a witness of the scene. A lady was visiting the zoological gardens in a German town with her daughter, when the little girl was seized with the wish to possess a pretty moulted feather which was lying on the ground in the parrots’ cage. She made several attempts to reach it, but in vain. Seeing which, an old cockatoo hopped solemnly from the back of the cage and taking up the feather in his beak, handed it to the child with an air of the greatest politeness.

One of the first upholders of the idea of legislative protection of animals was Jeremy Bentham, who asked why the law should refuse its protection to any sensitive being? Most people forget the degree of opposition which was encountered by the earlier combatants of cruel practices and pastimes in England. Cobbett made a furious attack on a clergyman who (to his honour) was agitating for the suppression of bull-baiting, “the poor man’s sport,” as Cobbett called it. That it demoralised the poor man as well as tormented the bull never entered into the head of the inimitable wielder of English prose, pure and undefiled, who took it under his (happily) ineffectual protection. “The common law fully sanctions the baiting of bulls,” he wrote, “and, I believe, that to sell the flesh of a bull which has _not_ been baited is an offence which is punishable by that very law to which you appeal” (“_Political Register_,” June, 1802).

Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had, in their day, to undergo almost as much criticism and ridicule in England as they now meet with in some parts of the Continent. Even the establishment of the Dogs’ Home in London raised a storm of disapproval, as may be seen by any one who turns over the files of the _Times_ for October, 1860. If the friends of humanity persevere, the change of sentiment which has become an accomplished fact in England will, in the end, triumph elsewhere.

Unfortunately, humane sentiment and humane practice do not progress on a level line. As long ago as 1782 an English writer named Soame Jenyns protested against the wickedness of shooting a bear on an inaccessible island of ice, or an eagle on the mountain’s top. “We are unable to give life and therefore ought not to take it away from the meanest insect without sufficient reason.” What would he say if he came back to earth to find whole species of beautiful winged creatures being destroyed to afford a barbarous ornament for women’s heads?

The “discovery” of Indian literature brought prominently forward in the West the Indian ideas of animals of which the old travellers had given the earliest news. The effect of familiarity with those ideas may be traced in many writers, but nowhere to such an extent as in the works of Schopenhauer, for whom, as for many more obscure students, they formed the most attractive and interesting part of Oriental lore. Schopenhauer cannot speak about animals without using a tone of passionate vehemence which was, without doubt, genuine. He felt the intense enjoyment in observing them which the lonely soul has ever felt, whether it belonged to saint or sinner. All his pessimism disappears when he leaves the haunts of man for the retreats of beasts. What a pleasure it is, he says, to watch a wild animal going about undisturbed! It shows us our own nature in a simpler and more sincere form. “There is only one mendacious being in the world, and that is man. Every other is true and sincere.” It strikes me that total sincerity did not shine on the face of a dog which I once saw trotting innocently away, after burying a rabbit he had caught in a ploughed field near a tree in the hedge—the only tree there was—which would make it easy for him to identify the spot. But about that I will say no more. The German “Friend of the Creature” was indignant at “the unpardonable forgetfulness in which the lower animals have hitherto been left by the moralists of Europe.” The duty of protecting them, neglected by religion, falls to the police. Mankind are the devils of the earth and animals the souls they torment.

Full of these sentiments, Schopenhauer was prepared to welcome unconditionally the Indian conception of the Wheel of Being and to close his eyes to its defects. Strauss, too, hailed it as a doctrine which “unites the whole of Nature in one sacred and mysterious bond”—a bond in which, he goes on to say, a breach has been made by the Judaism and dualism of Christianity. He might have observed that the Church derived her notions on the subject rather from Aristotle than from Semitic sources.

Schopenhauer came to the conclusion that the ill-treatment of animals arose directly from the denial to them of immortality, while it was ascribed to men. There is and there is not truth in this. When all is said, the well-conditioned man always was and always will be humane; “the righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” And since people reason to fit their acts rather than act to fit their reasoning, he will even find a motive for his humanity where others find an excuse for the lack of it. Humphry Primatt wrote in 1776: “Cruelty to a brute is an injury irreparable because there is no future life to be a compensation for present afflictions.”

Mr. Lecky, in his “History of European Morals,” tells of a Cardinal who let himself be bitten by gnats because “_we_ have heaven, but these poor creatures only present enjoyment!” Could Jaina do more?

Strauss thought that the rising tide of popular sentiment about animals was the direct result of the abandonment by science of the spiritualistic isolation of man from Nature. I suspect that those who have worked hardest for animals in the last half-century cared little about the origin of species, while it is certain that some professed evolutionists have been their worst foes. The fact remains, however, that by every rule of logic the theory of evolution _ought_ to produce the effect which Strauss thought that it had produced. The discovery which gives its name to the nineteenth century revolutionises the whole philosophic conception of the place of animals in the Universe.

Lamarck, whom Cuvier so cruelly attacked, was the first to discern the principle of evolution. At one time he held the Chair of Zoology at the University of Paris; but the opposition which his ideas met with crushed him in body, though not in soul, and he died blind and in want in 1829, only consoled by the care of an admirable daughter. His last words are said to have been that it is easier to discover a truth than to convince others of it.

An Italian named Carlo Lessona was one of the first to be convinced. He wrote a work containing the phrase, “The intelligence of animals”—which work, by the rule then in force, had to be presented to the ecclesiastical Censor at Turin to receive his permit before publication. The canon who examined the book fell upon the words above mentioned, and remarked: “This expression, ‘intelligence of animals,’ will never do!” “But,” said Lessona, “it is commonly used in natural history books.” “Oh!” replied the canon, “natural history has much need of revision.”[12]

Footnote 12:

See Dr. F. Franzolini’s interesting monograph on animal psychology
from the point of view of science (“Intelligenza delle Bestie,” Udine,
1899).

The great and cautious Darwin said that the senses, intuitions, emotions, and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even, sometimes, in a well-developed condition in the lower animals. “Man, with all his noble qualities, his God-like intellect, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. Our brethren fly in the air, haunt the bushes, and swim in the sea.” Darwin agreed with Agassiz in recognising in the dog something very like the human conscience.

Dr. Arnold said that the whole subject of the brute creature was such a painful mystery that he dared not approach it. Michelet called animal life a “sombre mystery,” and shuddered at the “daily murder,” hoping that in another globe “these base and cruel fatalities may be spared to us.” It is strange to find how many men of very different types have wandered without a guide in these dark alleys of speculation. A few of them arrived at, or thought they had arrived at, a solution. Lord Chesterfield wrote that “animals preying on each other is a law of Nature which we did not make, and which we cannot undo, for if I do not eat chickens my cat will eat mice.” But the appeal to Nature will not satisfy every one; our whole human conscience is a protest against Nature, while our moral actions are an attempt to effect a compromise. Paley pointed out that the law was not good, since we could live without animal food and wild beasts could not. He offered another justification, the permission of Scripture. This was satisfactory to him, but he must have been aware that it waives the question without answering it.

Some humane people have taken refuge in the automata argument, which is like taking a sleeping-draught to cure a broken leg. Others, again, look for justice to animals in the one and only hope that man possesses of justice to himself; in compensation after death for unmerited suffering in this life. Leibnitz said that Eternal Justice _ought_ to compensate animals for their misfortunes on earth. Bishop Butler would not deny a future life to animals.

Speaking of her approaching death, Mrs. Somerville said: “I shall regret the sky, the sea, with all the changes of their beautiful colouring; the earth with its verdure and flowers: but far more shall I grieve to leave animals who have followed our steps affectionately for years, without knowing for certainty their ultimate fate, though I firmly believe that the living principle is never extinguished. Since the atoms of matter are indestructible, as far as we know, it is difficult to believe that the spark which gives to their union life, memory, affection, intelligence, and fidelity, is evanescent.”

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seven or eight small works, written in Latin in support of this thesis, were published in Germany and Sweden. Probably in all the world a number, unsuspectedly large, of sensitive minds has endorsed the belief expressed so well in the lines which Southey wrote on coming home to find that a favourite old dog had been “destroyed” during his absence:—

... “Mine is no narrow creed;
And He who gave thee being did not frame
The mystery of life to be the sport
Of merciless man! There is another world
For all that live and move—a better one!
Where the proud bipeds, who would fain confine
Infinite Goodness to the little bounds
Of their own charity, may envy thee!”

The holders of this “no narrow creed” start with all the advantages from the mere point of view of dialectics. They can boast that they have placed the immortality of the soul on a scientific basis. For truly, it is more reasonable to suppose that the soul is natural than supernatural, a word invented to clothe our ignorance; and, if natural, why not universal?

They have the right to say, moreover, that they and they alone have “justified the ways of God.” They alone have admitted all creation that groaneth and travaileth to the ultimate guerdon of the “Love which moves the sun and other stars.”

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INDEX

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Abdâls, 261-262

Abu Djafar al Mausur, Caliph, 232

Abu Jail, 241-243

Achilles, 26-27, 298

Adi Granth, 201

_Æsop’s fables_, 25, 29-30, 80-81

Aethe, 26

Aethon, 26

Afghan ballad, 241-243

African pastoral tribes, 95

Agamemnon, 25-26, 29

Agassiz, 364

Agora Temple, 77

_Ahimsa_, 166-167, 172, 193

Ahriman, 124-126, 143, 145-146, 149-151, 158-159

Ahriman, hymn to, 125

Ahuna-Vairya, 138

Ahura Mazda, 116, 121-122, 136, 138-139, 143, 154, 158-159

Alberti, Leo Battista, 154, 158-159, 352

Albigenses, 346

Alexander the Great, 75, 133

Alfonso, King of Spain, 291-292

Alger, W. R., 286

Alhambra, 229

Al Rakîm, 230

Amatongo, 107-109

Amazulu, 107

_L’âme est la fonction du cerveau_, 357

Ammon, Temple of, 31

Amon Ra, 103

Amritsar, 201

Anaxandrides, 82

Anchorites, 179, 252-254

Andromache, 26

Animals, treatment of, in India, 19;
the purgatory of men, 21;
slaying of, by Greeks, 24-25;
naming of, 26;
prophetic powers of, 27-28;
talking, 29;
Roman treatment of, 45-46;
butchery of, at Colosseum, 51;
imported for arena, 51-52;
humanity of, 53-54;
performing, 54-55;
Plutarch on kindness to, 64-71;
Plutarch on animal intelligence, 67-71;
instances of discrimination of, 75-76;
domestication of, 90-91;
value of, 94-95;
excuses for killing, 100;
attitude of savages to, 107-108;
killing of, by priests, 148-150;
Zoroastrian treatment of, 147-157;
in sacred books, 188;
Hebrew treatment of, 212-220;
hunting of, by Moslems, 224-225, 232, 241-243;
musical instinct in, 245-246;
and the Messiah, 247-252;
and saints, 259;
stories of, 306-316;
theory of Celsus as to intelligence of, 340-344;
theory of Porphyry, 344;
the Church and humanity, 346;
animal prosecutions, 347-351;
Renaissance admiration of, 352-353;
animals and thought, 355;
automata
theory, 353-359, 365;
societies to protect, 359-360;
ill-treatment and immortality, 362;
principle of evolution, 363

Antelope, 240

Ants, wisdom of, 76-77;
killing of, 149-150;
Hebrew proverb, 216;
in the Koran, 227;
social economy of, 341-342

Apis, 102, 144

Apollo, 246

Apollonius of Tyana, 268-269; 337-340; 345

Apsarases, the, 279-280

Apuleius, 55

Archæological Congress, 95

Archetypes (_see_ Fravashi)

Ardâ Vîrâf, 159-165

Arena, cruelties of the, 45-46

Ariosto, 297

Aristophanes, 28

Aristotle, 58, 78, 80, 269, 340, 362

Arnold, Dr., 364

Arnold, Sir Matthew, 302-303

Aryans, 13, 18, 113-115

Asceticism, 179-183

Astrachan, 258

Ataro, 162

Atharva-Veda, 208

Atman, 14

Augustus, 336

Automata theory, 353-359, 365

Avebury, Lord, 343

Avesta, 113, 116, 120, 123, 125, 128, 131, 133-140, 143, 145-148, 153,
155, 159, 163, 233-234

Bactria, 131

Baiardo, 297

Balaam’s ass, 212-213, 219

Balius, 26-27

Balkis, Queen, 229

Bankes’ horse, 283

Banyan deer, 327-230

Barbary, 296

Basan, Bulls of, 144

Basri, Hasan, 234

_Battle of the frogs and mice_, 29

Baudelaire, 18

Bavieca, 289-294

Bears, legends of, 88-89

Beast tales, 28, 317, 351

Beaver (_see_ Udra)

Bedouins, 272

Behkaa, 104

Benares, 183

Benedict XII., 49

Bentham, Jeremy, 359

Bhagavad, Gita, 14

Bion, 64

Birds, in captivity, 56-57;
Plutarch’s views on, 78;
language of, 226-227;
and St. Francis, 259-260

Bismarck, 304

Bi’sm-illah, custom of saying, 224

Bivar, Ruy Diaz de, 289-294

Blackbird, White, 51

Blake, Wm., 251

Bleeck, 153

Blessing the beast, rite of, 347

Boccaccio’s falcon, 285

Bœotia, 62

Boëthius, 345

Bolingbroke, 296

Bosanquet, Dr. R. C., 95

Brahmans, 14, 21, 169, 175, 183, 309

_Breath from the veldt, A_, 240

British school at Athens, 95

Broca, Professor, 354

Browning, Robert, 138

Bruno, Giordano, 216, 260-261, 353

Bubastis, 81

Bucephalus, 75

Buddhism, 21, 105-106, 124, 130, 167-173, 187, 190-196, 261, 273, 308,
321-328

_Buddhist India_, 328

Buffalo of Karileff, 254

Bull-baiting, 50, 359-360

Bull-fights, 32, 47-50

Bulls, 143-146

_Bundehesh_, 142-143

Burgundy, Duke of, 349

Burial, methods of, 123-124

Burkitt, Prof. F. C., 135-136

Burns and Oates, 346

Burns, Robert, 59

Cæsar, Julius, 51, 53, 55, 296

Cagliari, 248

Callaway, Canon, 109

Cambaleth, 195

Cambyses, 144

Camels, 286

Canna, 333-334

Carbonaria, 49

Carlyle, Thos., 33

Cartesian philosophy, 353-355

Carthage, 211

Cassandra, 29

Cato, 45

Cats, 80-83, 155, 222, 258, 278, 314, 322

Celsus, 73, 339-344

Celts, 273-274

Ceriana, 358

Cervantes, 290

Chanet, 355

Chantal, Mdme. de, 178

Chariot-racing, 30

Charles, King (the Peace), 50

Chesterfield, Lord, 364

Childebert, 254-255

_China, religion of_, 327

Chinese, belief and folk-lore, 104-106;
saving of animal life, 194;
folk-lore stories, 306-308, 313-316, 326-330.

Chinvat, 154, 158, 162

Choo-Foo-Tsze, 104

Christianity, approach of, 337-338

Cicada, 260

Cicero, 16, 50, 58-59, 128, 340

Cignani, 208

Cimon, 31

Circuses, 54-55

_Clothilde’s God_, 93

Clovis, 93

Clytemnestra, 29

Cobbett, 359

Cockatoo, Story of a, 359

Colonna, Cardinal, 49

Colosseum, Butchery at inauguration of, 51

Comte, Auguste, 133

Concha, 57-58

Confucianism, 104-105, 130

Constantinople, 233

Constantinople, Council at, 14

_Contemporary Review_, 6

Copenhagen National Museum, 47

Corinna, Parrot of, 56

Corsica, 347

Crete, 32, 77, 95

Cuvier, 363

Cyrus, 118, 121-122

Daevas, 116

d’Alviella, Count Goblet, 5

Damascus, 231, 306

Dante, 13, 160, 162-163, 187

Darmesteter, James, 241

Darius, 119, 121-122

Darwin, Charles, 150-151, 206, 344, 363-364

Darwin, Francis, 175

Davids, Professor T. W. Rhys, 328

Deathlessness of souls, 91-92

Deer (_see_ Banyan deer)

Dervishes, 234-235, 261

Descartes, 16, 353-357

Deucalion, dove of, 78

Diaz, Gil, 293

Digby, Sir Kenelm, 283

Dog, grave of a faithful, 314

Dogs, 57-59, 79-80, 114-115, 151-153, 158, 229-233, 244, 306-308, 312,
314-316, 322-324, 358-359

Dog’s Grave, the, 79

Dolmen-builders, 92-93, 96

Domestication of animals, 90-91

Doughty, Charles M., 236

Doukhobors, 32

Downe, 283

Draupadi, story of, 322-324

Dravidians, 18-19, 163

Duperron, Anquetil, 135, 152

Eden, Garden of, 208-209

Eden, Garden of (picture by Rubens), 247

Edkins, Joseph, D.D., 327

_l’Église et la Pitié envers les Animaux_, 346

Egyptian cosmogony, 103-104

El Djem, well at, 109

Elephants, legend of, 74-75, 77;
in Oriental books, 188;
white elephant killed by Rustem, 294

Eleusinian mysteries, 32

Elisha and the she-bears, 248-249

Elmocadessi, Azz’Eddin, 236

Empedocles, 14-15, 34, 72

Epictetus, 73-74

Epirus, 57

Erasmus, 16, 353

Eskimo, the, 88-89, 92

Euripides, 78, 190, 246, 340

Evolution, theory of, 363-365

Falcon, Persian fable of a, 313

Faliscus, Gratius, 57

Fargard XIII., 152

Ferrière, Émile, 357

_Fioretti_, 74, 258

Firdusi, 141, 225, 240, 294, 296, 301-304

Flesh-eating, 24-25, 31-32, 61-64, 71, 85-86, 148, 193-194, 217-218

Folk-lore Association of Chicago, 102

_Folk-Songs of Southern India_, 17

Foxes, 106

Franzolini, Dr. F., 363

Fravashi, 117, 145, 162

Games, Roman, 47-48, 51-52

Gargantuan feasts, 148

Garibaldi, 294, 298

Gâthâs, 134, 139, 144-145

Gautama, 308

Gayatri, 117-118, 138

Gayo Marathan, 143

Gellert, Beth, 306-307, 309, 312

Geus Urva, 143-144