Attempts are still made, from time to time, to revive the old Cartesian doctrine that animals do not feel pain. Thus Mr. E. Kay Robinson, in a book entitled “The Religion of Nature” (1906) has sought to bring peace and comfort to the minds of his readers, and to reconcile the seeming cruelties of Nature with the existence of a merciful God, by proving that the non-human races, unlike mankind, have no consciousness of suffering, even when they exhibit all the symptoms of pain and show a dread of its recurrence. This is nothing but the ancient doctrine of Descartes in a new garb, and is itself the outcome of the old anthropocentric view of the world.
On the practical results that would follow the general acceptance of Mr. Robinson’s theories it is hardly worth while to speculate. He himself is at pains to suggest that while the Cartesian doctrine undoubtedly led to cruelty in the past, the modern Robinsonian version of it would have the opposite effect. I greatly doubt it. For to whatever extent it is true that animals are unconscious of pain, to the same extent it must be true that there is no “cruelty” (in the true sense of the term) in “paining” them. An enlightened man, no doubt, will avoid any tyrannical interference with the lives of other beings, whether they are conscious or not, but the majority of men are not enlightened, nor in any hurry to become so; we are living, in fact, in an age of very gross and palpable savagery, out of which nothing can lift us but the growing sense of kinship. Mr. Robinson’s book is one of the latest attempts—and, in some respects, the feeblest—to impair in a very important respect this sense of[98] close kinship between the human and the non-human, and for that reason I regard it as very mischievous in its tendency. As a fair instance of Mr. Robinson’s logic, let us take his triumphant citation of the fact that even a human being, when engaged in some desperate and painful struggle, is often conscious, for the moment, of neither fear nor pain. From this Mr. Robinson quietly assumes that animals are always thus unconscious, because (a) some of their actions and emotions are so, and (b) “we have no right to suppose that one action or emotion of an animal is more conscious than another.” But, on the contrary, we have every right to suppose that consciousness varies in animals, as in men, as may be gathered from the indifference which two fighting dogs will show to the blows rained upon them by their owners, though at a moment of less excitement the same blows would elicit the most obvious signs of pain.
The crux of the whole problem lies here—in the meaning of the gestures by which animals appear to indicate that, like human beings, they are conscious of their various emotions, and it is by his chapter on “Actions of Animals Explained” that Mr. Robinson’s treatise must be judged. Humanitarians entirely reject his dogmatic assertion (to take a typical example) that “a dog’s exhibition of distress when separated from its master and mistress is only the working of the strong instinct of the gregarious, hunting animal, needing the primary factor of his life, namely, a leader to follow.” Not a particle of real proof can be given in support of such statements, and it is upon foundations of this kind that the “Religion of Nature” is built. And here there come to mind those trenchant words of Mr. Cunninghame Graham, which exactly describe the tone and method of Mr. Robinson’s argument:
“Instinct and reason; the hypothetical difference which good weak men use as an anæsthetic, when their conscience pricks[99] them for their sins of omission and commission to their four-footed brethren. But a distinction wholly without a difference, and a link in the long chain of fraud and force with which we bind all living things, men, animals, and most of our reasoning selves, in one crass neutral-tinted slavery.”