What do our up-to-date scientists think (if they think at all) of the justification of vivisection put forward by Monsignor John S. Vaughan, a sacerdotalist of the medieval school? To a watchful observer few things could have been more entertaining than the spectacle of an old-world Catholic, a belated casuist of (say) thirteenth century temperament, coming forward in the Saturday Review (new style) to justify, from a moral standpoint, the doings of the modern vivisector, and basing his argument on the immemorial “proposition” that “beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.”
Now, there are undoubtedly numbers of persons living in this twentieth century who still hold the belief that the animals were created for man’s pleasure, and it may be that, in appealing to that ancient superstition, Mgr. Vaughan was using the most popular weapon in the pro-vivisectionist armoury. But whatever the “man in the street” may think on this subject, the evolutionist and man of science, at any rate, is not able to take refuge in the plea that man is the centre of the universe, and that all other beings were created for mankind; for if there is one thing above others that Darwin’s followers have scouted, it is this old anthropocentric notion which forms the Monsignor’s “proposition.” The animals, according to the scientific view, were not designed for man’s benefit, nor is there any impassable gulf between human and non-human—on the contrary, man was evolved from among the animals, and is in very truth an animal himself. This is the creed, beyond denial or evasion, of the Darwinian scientists, whose torture of their rudimentary brethren the sacerdotalist is so eager to[105] condone. Monsignor Vaughan is defending vivisection by an assumption which the vivisectors themselves must hold to be unscientific and obsolete. The sufficient answer to the anthropocentric fallacy of the theologian is found in Mr. Howard Moore’s laconic remark: “But Darwin has lived.”
But vivisection has got to be defended somehow, on moral, as well as medical, grounds; and to do Monsignor Vaughan justice the ground he alleges is the only one that can afford, or could once have afforded, any semblance of logical foot-hold. “Beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.” In that unquestioned belief lay the justification—the supposed justification—of the horrible tortures inflicted on animals in the medicinal and magical quackery of the middle ages, when, as Dr. Berdoe has pointed out, “the nastier the medicament the more was expected of it.” Animals were regarded alike by the religion, and the science, and the common usage of the times, as mere things, providentially designed to be the instruments of man’s welfare, at the cost of whatever suffering to themselves. What, therefore, if they were carved, and tortured, and vivisected to provide mankind with the filthy nostrums prescribed as the remedies for disease? An anthropocentric philosophy could explain and justify it all. And so it might do at the present time, but for the fact that the anthropocentric philosophy—as a philosophy—has itself ceased to exist.
Indeed, the point of the complaint against the scientists is precisely this—that the practice of vivisection, though perhaps logically justifiable on the absurd old belief that animals have no raison d’être except to minister to man’s convenience, is wholly unjustifiable in the light of evolutionary science, which has demonstrated beyond question the kinship of all sentient life. That the scientist, in order to rake together a moral defence for his doings, should condescend to take shelter even under the medieval reasoning of the sacerdotalist, is a[106] proof that his position is hopelessly inconsistent and unsound; for having got rid of the old anthropocentric fallacy in the realm of science, he actually avails himself of the same fallacy in the realm of ethics. This, of course, is less surprising when we remember that one and the same person may be, and often is, as reactionary in one department of thought as he is progressive in another, and that the modern man of science is not infrequently a medievalist in morals. The present writer well remembers the incident which first shook his faith in the infallibility of “science.” He had adopted a vegetarian diet, and a distinguished scientist with whom he happened to be on friendly terms expressed a wish to “speak to him” on the subject. The writer felt that a critical moment had arrived, and awaited the scientific pronouncement with respectful anxiety. When it came—spoken with evident earnestness—it was this: “Don’t you think the animals were sent us as food?”
So we see the scientist and the sacerdotalist, forgetting their radical differences, patching up a superficial alliance with the pious object of perpetuating the experimental torture of the laboratory. Henceforward let none say that Darwinian and Catholic are not in agreement. Laborare est orare was the old saying; and now surely it should be expanded by Monsignor Vaughan and his Catholic fellow-vivisectionists into laboratorium est oratorium—the house of torture is the house of prayer. If it is not exactly “mercy and truth” that are met together, “righteousness and peace” that have kissed each other, still it is a beautiful and touching scene of reconciliation—this meeting of scientist and sacerdotalist over the torture-trough of the helpless animal. They might exclaim in the words of Tennyson:—
“There above the little grave,
O there above the little grave,
We kissed again with tears.”
[107]It seems to us as humanitarians, that, as far as Monsignor Vaughan and the Catholic vivisectionist school is concerned (it is otherwise with the scientists), it is pure waste of time to argue with them, there being a fundamental difference of opinion as to data and principles. The sole reason for discussion is to insure that the humanitarian view of the question be rightly placed before the public, and this can best be done by stating it clearly in contradistinction to the anthropocentric dogma. We do not admit the assumption that “beasts exist for the use and benefit of man.” We view the matter in a wholly different aspect. We find ourselves born into an age which has been evolved in a gradual progress from savagery to civilization, with old-world wrongs around us, the worst of which are being slowly redeemed, century after century, by a growing spirit of brotherhood. We have never pretended that these wrongs, woven as they are into the fabric of Society, can be immediately and simultaneously righted, nor do we admit, in the case of the lower animals any more than in the case of men, that the necessity of inflicting some pain confers the right to inflict any pain. We insist on the undeniable tendency from barbarism to humaneness, which has already at many points bridged the gulf between man and man, and will also bridge the gulf between man and his lower fellow-creatures. Science has exploded the idea that there is any difference in kind, and not in degree only, between the human and the non-human animal; and sympathy, guided by reason, is making it more and more impossible that we should for ever treat as mere automata fellow-beings to whom we are, in fact, very closely akin.
Humane Review, 1901.