The Place of Animals in Human Thought

In the Chinese Buddhist version of Gellert we are told that a very poor Brahman who had to beg his bread possessed a pet mungoose, which, as he had no children, became as fondly...

I am not aware that Gift Sacrifice ever led to cannibalism nor, in its primitive forms, did it lead to eating the flesh of the animal victim which was buried or burnt with the b...

Those who try to divest themselves of human nature rarely succeed, and the reason nearest to the surface why, over all the world, the lonely recluse made friends with animals wa...

As the Jaina scriptures are in effect a manual of discipline for monks, it is natural that they should be severe on womankind. Not that a woman’s soul is worth less than a man’s...

With good sense and in that spirit of compromise which is really the basis of morality, Plutarch argued that cruelty to animals does not lie in the use but in the abuse of them;...

One animal is missing from Plutarch’s portrait gallery—the cat, to which he only concedes the ungracious allusion “that man had not the excuse of hunger for eating flesh, like t...

Repelling the disingenuous charge of abandoning his wife and brethren, Yudishtira remarks with dignity that he left not them but their dead bodies on the road: he could not brin...

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 lightl...

But there is something more. Every one knows that the Jews were allowed to kill and eat animals. The Jewish religion makes studiously few demands on human nature. “The ways of t...

I have strayed rather far from the Roman shows, but the savagery of Christians in the fourteenth century (and after) should make us wonder less at Roman callousness. All our adm...

It is by no means clear when the prejudice against dogs took hold of the Moslem mind. At first their presence was even tolerated inside the Mosque, and the report that the Proph...

Among the Greeks, sensitive and meditative minds which did not place faith in the Pythagorean system of life were attracted, nevertheless, by its speculative possibilities which...

The belief that beasts were inhabited by depraved men has a certain affinity with the belief that depraved men were inhabited by demons. Dante maintains that some persons have a...

As a rule unnamed wild animals may be supposed to have been protected. The fox was considered a powerful daeva-scarer, which shows that not only in China did the fox seem an “un...

Though not immortal, Ahriman was primordial. Unlike the fallen star of the morning, what he is, that he was. He did not choose Evil: he _is_ Evil as Ormuzd _is_ Good. He can cre...

With extreme unanimity the three hundred and sixty-two drew back their hands as fast as they could. Then the speaker continued: “How is this, philosophers; what _are_ you doing...

The cult of the serpent in its many branches is the greatest of animal cults, and it is the one in which we see most clearly the process by which man from being an impressionist...

It is sometimes said that there is as much cruelty to animals in India as anywhere. Some of this cruelty (as it seems to us) is caused directly by reluctance to take life; of th...

Thomas, “the Israelite philosopher,” as he called himself, author of the Pseudo-Thomas which is said to date from the second century, appears to have been a Jewish convert belon...

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...

It is the horse not his master that leads me into the mazes of the _Shah Nameh_, but something of Rustem must be told to make Rakush’s story intelligible. Like Siegfried, Rustem...

The Jainas say of Mahavira that he was one of a long line of holy ascetics twenty-four of whom are venerated in their temples under the name of Tirthakaras or Jinas, “Conquerors...

NO investigator of early Iran can afford to neglect the _Shahnameh_ of Firdusi, which was as good history as he could make it; that is to say, it was founded on extremely old le...

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 65720-h.htm or 65720-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65...

Horses, famous, 26-27; sacrifice of, 114; in Oriental books, 188; St. Columba’s horse, 255; in chivalrous age, 281-282; thinking, 283; Arab and his horse, 285-288; Hatem’s horse...