Part 7

Is it too much to say that in this inordinate opinion of his own powers and merits lies the secret of this man’s Pessimism, of his contempt of other men, of his discontent with life, of his revolt against Providence? It is not wonderful that a man who looks on his fellows like Apollo Belvidere, slaying them with the arrows of his scorn, should find them wretched and unlovable; for no man, however humble, is ever truly seen by him who looks _down_ on him, and thus lacks all the insight of love and sympathy, and all the charity of one who forgives as he hopes to be forgiven. It is not wonderful that a man who estimates himself as supremely wise, and condones his own faults on the score of the unalterableness of natural character, should survey the world and find it a godless desert. Probably no human heart ever yet bloomed out into gratitude even under the brightest sunshine of prosperity, which had not once been ploughed up by self-reproach and softened by tears of repentance. In truth, any kind of religious sense is well-nigh incompatible with such pride as we are discussing. The doors whereby other men enter the Temple,--the tender guidance of human affection, the awful strife of the higher self against passion and sin, the sacred moral ambition after yet unattained purity and goodness,--all these are closed to him. Schopenhauer’s religious history is a confirmation of the truth that it is not the marble-palace mind of the philosopher which God will visit so often as the humble heart which lies sheltered from the storms of passion, and all trailed over by the sweet blossoms of human affections.

It is actually ludicrous to compare this man’s intensely selfish, vain, cowardly character with the magnificent compliments which he paid to virtue in the abstract, and to the ideal he draws of the perfect man, or “ascetic,” in whom the very sense of individuality, not to speak of self-regard, is annihilated: “He will no longer regard himself as a real existence, comprised within the rigid line of personality, and thus insulated and differentiated from the rest of the universe. He will regard his separate being as a mere transitory phenomenon, a temporary objectivation of the sole real existence; and this recognition of his true position must necessarily destroy selfishness.... When a man ceases to draw an egotistic distinction between himself and others, and takes as much part in their sorrows as in his own, it naturally follows that such a one, recognizing his own self in all beings, must regard the endless griefs of all beings as his own, and thus appropriate to himself the sorrows of the whole world.”[17] The modern “Man of Sorrows” (if we may venture on so irreverent a comparison for the sake of the contrast) had, for his own use, an easy method of “appropriating” the griefs of his kind. “We gather,” says his keen-sighted critic of the _Contemporary Review_, “from the accounts of his disciples, that he had arranged for himself an existence more than tolerable; for, while free from positive annoyance, he found a perfectly consistent and legitimate source of pleasure in the disinterested contemplation of the idea of the world’s sorrows.”[18] A more easy form of martyrdom it is hard to imagine.

Is it not somewhat surprising that a man like this, who, to do him justice, made no pretence of practising what he taught, but said openly, with cynical effrontery, “I preach sanctity, but I am no saint,”[19] should have exercised any influence over his generation? We read, however, that “his little band of disciples grew, and their fanaticism reached a ludicrous point. One entreated him to found a trust for the purpose of keeping watch that no syllable of his works should ever be altered; another had his portrait painted and placed in a room like a chapel,”[20] etc.

This particular hero-worship is, to my thinking, so portentous that I have been tempted thus to study it at some length. For thousands of years, the human race has gone on adding one noble type to another in its Pantheon,--the old heathen patriotism and heroism of a Theseus, a Codrus, a Curtius, a Regulus, the modest wisdom of a Socrates, and the stoic grandeur of a Marcus Aurelius. Christianity added yet saintlier virtues to the ideal,--the charity, the purity, the religious fervor, and martyr devotion of a whole army of saints. Yet all these “stars of our mortal night” can, it seems, be obscured and forgotten; and men who might have known and honored and followed them, like the Magi of old, prefer to dance after such a flaring link-light as Schopenhauer lifted over his own head! Observing this, and how his desolate doctrine is gaining ground, and recognizing not a few of his personal characteristics (more especially his arrogance) among other thinkers nearer home, we are tempted to turn back fondly and regretfully to the humblest old-fashioned goodness. Many of us had confidently trusted that, when knowledge increased, wisdom and love would grow along with it; that, without losing the sacred lessons of the past, mankind would obtain still deeper insight into moral truth, and that phases of character would appear more beautiful, more joyous, more perfectly rounded in all the gifts and graces of humanity than the world yet has seen,--the long-severed virtues of the hero and the saint combined at last.

Alas! if Schopenhauers are to increase and multiply among us, these hopes have been visionary, indeed! As his character emerges from his biography, and stands clearly revealed to sight, memories of many a man and woman of small account in the world rise up and range themselves in our thoughts for comparison opposite to this great philosopher. We remember those who, instead of flying from the terrors of pestilence or war, have freely gone to meet them at the call of benevolence or patriotism. We remember those who, instead of finding their fellow-men “despicable,” have been lifelong loving friends, faithful and tender husbands, devoted parents and children, ardent philanthropists, sacrificing wealth and health and every enjoyment that they might relieve and bless the most miserable of mankind,--the criminal, the diseased, the vicious, and abandoned. We remember those who, instead of resting self-satisfied with the “unalterableness” of their own moral defects, have striven day and night, like the Pilgrim fighting on his knees against Apollyon, to purify their hearts of every stain, and, instead of arraigning Providence because their merits were insufficiently rewarded, have blessed God most of all for their afflictions. We remember all these, and also we remember the glory of peace and patience on their pain-worn faces; and from the depths of our souls comes the verdict that the dullest “Philistine” of them all was, in the scale of true nobleness, worth a thousand pessimist philosophers.

Schopenhauer was, in truth, the best illustration which could be found of the fallacy of the modern intellect-worship, the idolatry of mere mental force, which is scarcely less stupid and ignoble than the idolatry of the physical force of winds or waters. As baseness is more contemptible in a king, and miserliness in a millionnaire, so are all moral faults and littlenesses only more despicable when set on the pedestal of genius. There are minds--and Schopenhauer’s was one of them--whose brilliancy is that of a light-house. Its best use is to disclose the cold and troubled sea, and the dreary rocks whereon the unwary might make shipwreck.

* * * * *

The question, “How far is Pessimism _true_, and how far does the 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”;