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FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANIMALS FROM VIVISECTION. 
 
 THE FUTURE 
 
 LOWER ANIMALS. 
 
 FBANCES POWER COBBE. 
 
 FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANIMALS FROM VIVISECTION, 
 
 United tvith the 
 
 (International §,ss0ciaticrn 
 
 FOR THE TOTAL SUPPRESSION OF VIVISECTION, 
 Offices:—!, VICTORIA STREET, LONDON, 8.W. 
 

 Var^pMe*" 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE LOWER 
 ANIMALS. 
 
 Among the problems which have presented themselves 
 with painful urgency to the minds of many Anti-vivisec- 
 tionists is that of the Future Life of Brutes. So long as we 
 contemplated their humble existences — as Mr. Carlill does 
 in the Nineteenth Century for last month, * — as containing at 
 least as great a surplus of pleasure over pain as the ordinary life 
 of man, it was natural for us to do little more than wish that 
 their beautiful intelligence and devotion might not be extin- 
 guished, and that it might be permitted to ourselves to renew 
 in a perfect world those relations with some of them which 
 have contributed no inconsiderable item to our enjoyment 
 on this earth. Though Mahomet — that typical Semite — 
 cheerfully announced that only three animals will be 
 admitted to Paradise, to wit, his own Camel, Balaam's Ass, 
 and Tobit's Bog, we, Aryans, have been apt, like the hero of 
 the Mahabharata, to think that a hound who has followed 
 his master faithfully here below might be permitted to attend 
 him on a higher way. Eden itself, to our fancy, would be 
 somewhat incomplete were it only inhabited by lofty 
 intelligences, with no playful beasts or warbling birds to 
 people the lower ranks of life. If music and flowers (or 
 some glorified analogues of them) may lawfully be antici- 
 pated, those amongst us who love animals better than harps 
 or roses, cannot be blamed for hoping for their presence 
 
 * We recommend this article to our readers as, on the whole, 
 sensible and comforting, though the writer seems tons to leave out of 
 sight some very important points of the problem he discusses ; notably 
 the large share which, for pain and pleasure, the affections take in 
 the lives of the higher kinds of animals ; beside the whole topic of 
 scientific torture with which we are concerned. He admits, however, 
 fully, the enormously enhanced sensitiveness to pain in domesticated 
 animals, e.g., the "humanised dog." It is, alas! chiefly these very 
 hyper-sensitive creatures who are chosen as victims by vivisectors. 
 
likewise. Further and more seriously. Many of the wisest 
 of thinkers have maintained that the " Spirit of the Beast " 
 may, on metaphysical grounds, be believed to survive the 
 death of its body ; while the intense power of affection 
 which some of them exhibit has furnished another argument, 
 embodied in the touching epitaph on a dog — 
 
 O'er this sepulchral spot 
 
 Emblems of hope we twine ; 
 If God be Love, what sleeps below was not 
 
 Without a spark Divine. 
 
 But another side of the subject has opened to us since we 
 have learned that to thousands of the most sensitive animals 
 the gift of existence has been transformed into a calamity. 
 Optimists as many of us were before we knew of the crimes 
 of science, our rose coloured views of the general happiness 
 of creation have been all blurred and blotted since we realized 
 the import of the revelations of cruelty contained in such 
 publications as Weber's Torture Chamber, Scholl's Ayez 
 Pitie, and our own Light in Dark Places. The truth — a 
 bitter drop in the cup of our lives — has perforce been drunk 
 in ; that Science, by the aid of exquisitely delicate machinery 
 and far-fetched drugs, and skill, and patience, and ingenuity 
 worthy of a God-like instead of a Devil-like task, has 
 achieved the creation of AGONY such as simple Nature never 
 knew, — a new factor in the dark problem of evil, never 
 again to be left out of our view. 
 
 The sense thus aroused in many minds of the cruel wrongs 
 of vivisected animals, has led them to review with new interest 
 and deeper concern the hypothesis of another life reserved for 
 such creatures when death has relieved them from their uncle- 
 served sufferings. Theenquiry " Have they another existence?" 
 is no longer merely suggested by tenderness and regret, 
 but pressed on them with the whole weight of their faith in 
 eternal Justice. Perhaps some one special case of which 
 they have read recurs continually, challenging some solution 
 endurable to their moral sense. Perhaps it is Paul Bert's 
 dog left alone at night, with all the chief nerves of its body 
 dissected out and exposed, and with the clanking engine still 
 forcing air into its lungs, after the torturer, wearied with bis 
 work, had gone to rest. Perhaps it is one of those baked to 
 
death by Claude Bernard in his stove. Perhaps some other 
 poor brute, the victim of Schiff, or Roy, or Rutherford, or 
 Goltz, — which has been dealt with by Man as Man might be 
 dealt with by God if He were to thrust his adoring servant into 
 Hell. They cannot banish this foully-wronged and tortured 
 animal from their thoughts. It importunes them by day, 
 and when they lie awake at night they almost see it lying 
 on the vivisecting table in the laboratory. It brings a pang 
 and a distraction into their prayers. They implore to be 
 shown how thsy ought to think of it consistently with their 
 reliance on the Judge of all the earth to do right, and their 
 faith that in His universe there can be no final and remediless 
 injustice. 
 
 It is with great diffidence that any one should presume 
 to speak on such a subject, but, as it is often helpful to 
 know what others think, the present writer will venture 
 to say plainly that, so far as appears, there is no 
 possible solution of this heart-wearing question save the 
 bold assumption that the existence of the vivisected animal 
 (and of course, as a consequence, of other creatures of the 
 same rank in nature) dues not end at death. It is absolutely 
 necessary to postulate a future life for the tortured dog or 
 horse or monkey, if we would escape the unbearable 
 conclusion that a sentient creature, unoffending, nay, 
 incapable of offence, has been given by the Creator an 
 
 EXISTENCE WHICH ON THE WHOLE HAS BEEN A CURSE. That 
 
 conclusion would be blasphemy. Rejecting it with all the 
 energy of our souls, we find ourselves logically driven to assume 
 the future life of (some, at least, amocg) the lower animals. 
 
 And in that future life we are (by the hypothesis) 
 authorized to conceive of the creature as so happy, so raised 
 in the scale of being, as that its past sufferings will be 
 wholly outweighed and nullified, and its existence, taking it 
 altogether, made a boon and not an evil, a benediction, not a 
 calamity. This, and nothing short of it, will satisfy our 
 sense of justice ; and it must never be forgotten that though 
 the justice of the Great Lord of All may be, and no doubt is, 
 a far more lofty and blessed thing than our poor minds can 
 devise, it can never be a lesser justice. It is impossible that 
 He will ever through eternity do aught which, could we 
 
6 
 
 understand it, we should regard with that hatred and loathing 
 wherewith He Himself has made us regard injustice. Neither 
 is it true, as Agnostics frequently argue, that future happi- 
 ness cannot undo the injustice of past unmerited suffering. 
 It is quite in harmony with the conception of a Eighteous 
 Governor of the world, that He may for good reason permit 
 undeserved pain to fall on a being to whom He knows, with 
 the unerring certainty of Omniscience, that it shall hereafter 
 be abundantly compensated and made up. This, in fact, is 
 the great distinction between Divine and human Justice. 
 Not that the former is different in kind from the latter, but 
 that it works in unlimited space and time : 
 
 " Tu, n'as qu'un jour pour etre juste, 
 J' ni Veternite devant Moi." 
 
 Of course the resource of believing in the future life of 
 tortured animals cannot be available to those who are unfor- 
 tunate enough to have lost faith in the future life of human 
 beings ; and even to those who hold firmly by the creed that 
 "the soul of a Man never dies," there are great difficulties 
 in believing that creatures of a lower grade, who are not 
 Moral Free Agents, should likewise survive corporeal disso- 
 lution. Many of the strongest grounds on which we build 
 our own hopes of immortality are lacking when we would 
 extend them to the brutes ; and there is a special stumbling- 
 block which never fails to be placed in our way, which is 
 briefly this : If we suppose a Dog or Horse or Elephant 
 to live after death, it is impossible (it is said) to limit the 
 privilege to such noble animals. , Below them, shading off 
 by the finest degrees, are humbler and yet humbler ranks of 
 vertebrate, and finally of invertebrate, creatures. Beneath 
 Man, and between him and the Dog or Horse, there 
 is, indeed, a sufficiently sharp line, where Reason and 
 Morality and Religion (in all but some vague and shadowy 
 sense) apparently stop ; and where, accordingly, it is easy to 
 suppose the limits of immortality are drawn. But if we 
 descend a step below humau beings we find no further excuse 
 for limiting the great boon at the bounds of one species or 
 another. Thus to argue for the immortality of a Dog is (it 
 is contended) to land ourselves in the absurdity of arguing 
 practically for the immortality of a Coral-insect. 
 
The mode of viewing the question which leads us into this 
 dilemma is essentially a physico-scientific, not a moral or 
 spiritual, one. It is true that in the material world there 
 are no breaks in the chain of being — -or, if there ever 
 were, Haeckel and his fellow Darwinians fill them up 
 boldly with hypothetical links. But the Life after Death 
 is not a matter wherewith physical science is concerned, 
 or whereto it bears any testimony. It belongs to the 
 moral and spiritual order of things ; and in that order 
 there are breaks and chasms, over which we pass per 
 saltum, if at all. Not seldom, for example, does a human 
 soul traverse in an hour the measureless moral abyss 
 between the Kingdom of Darkness and the Kingdom of 
 Light ; and undergo a palingenesia to which nothing 
 that happens in earth or air or waters affords the slightest 
 parallel. And in this particular matter of Immortality, 
 if one single living Man be now an Immortal Being, that 
 man must, at one time or other, have leaped from the Mortal 
 to the Immortal at a bound. There must have been a time, 
 earlier or later, before or after birth, Avhen be was not 
 immortal, but might have perished as an abortion ; and again 
 a time when he had become immortal and would not perish 
 were his body reduced to ashes. It is idle, then, for any 
 one who believes in human immortality, to object to the 
 possible immortality of a dog on the ground that no line can 
 be drawn between the highly intelligent mammal and a 
 coral insect. We may retort, " Neither can any line be 
 drawn between an adult Man, whom we recognise to be an 
 immortal being, and the first formless embryo which he once 
 was ; — and which, strangely enough, was (we are told) 
 almost undistinguishable from the embryo of the dog. 
 
 Perhaps this parallel between individual human develop- 
 ment which slowly brings the child up to the level of 
 Immortality may afford not only an answer to the above 
 discussed difficulty, but also a valuable rough indication of 
 the ranks of animal life among which we may, not unreason- 
 ably, expect to find possible candidates for a future existence. 
 Let us permit ourselves to guess any epoch in the human 
 creature's development when it becomes immortal. Then we 
 may, not too audaciously, extend our hope of immortality 
 
to all animals which have reached that stage— whatever it 
 may be. We cannot for a moment suppose the tremendous 
 alternative of immortality or extinction to be decided by 
 arrival at any arbitrary, or merely physical turning point, 
 such as may occur at various epochs either before birth, or 
 at the moment of birth, or later. We must believe it to be 
 determined by entrance on some moral or mental stage, such 
 as may be represented by the words Consciousness, Self 
 Consciousness, Intelligence, power of Love, or the like ; by 
 the development, in short, of the mysterious Somewhat above 
 the merely vegetative, or animated life, for which we believe 
 such life to be the scaffolding. If then (as we are wont to 
 take for granted) a child of some six or twelve, or eighteen 
 months' old be certainly an immortal creature, it follows 
 that the stage of existence which involves immortality must 
 be an early one, which many a dog has attained. On the 
 other hand, as those animals which are altogether below the 
 condition of the human infant are not so highly organized 
 or sensitive as ever to suffer torture, our hypothesis allows 
 us to suppose them to become extinct at death, while it 
 leaves us free humbly to trust lhat every annual subjected 
 to torture, — either by science or any other agency, — will 
 live again in conditions of happiness which will amply 
 redress the balance of good in the sum of its existence. 
 
 To conclude. Does not every flower of the field offer us 
 a parable which may serve for man and beast alike ? There 
 is a stage of growth when, if the stalk be cut down or the 
 petals torn away, no seed will ripen. There is a further 
 stage when the stalk may be broken and the beautiful petals 
 trodden in the dust, but when the seed will not perish, but 
 live, and bloom wheresoever it may be borne by the winds 
 of heaven. 
 
 DUKE neff, gEtffER Ll§. 
 Historical e$j LEction