Part 31

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.”

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?