Animals' rights considered in relation to social progress / With a bibliographical appendix, by Henry S. Salt. Also an essay on vivisection in America. By Albert Leffingwell.

  • Salt, Henry S., 1851-1939.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Animals' rights considered in relation to social progress / With a bibliographical appendix, by Henry S. Salt. Also an essay on vivisection in America. By Albert Leffingwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    The second and not less fruitful source of modern in- humanity is to be found in the '' Cartesian '' doctrine —the theory of Descartes and his followers—that the lower animals are devoid of consciousness and feeling; a theory which carried the ^* religious notion a step fur- ther, and deprived the animals not only of their claim to a life hereafter, but of anything that could, without mockery, be called a life in the present, since mere ^'animated machines, as they were thus affirmed to be, could in no real sense be said to live at all! Well might Voltaire turn his humane ridicule against this most mon- strous contention, and suggest, with scathing irony, that God ''had given the animals the organs of feeling, to the end that they might not feel! The theory of animal automatism, says one of the leading scientists of the present day,i '' which is usually attributed to Descartes, can never be accepted by common sense. Yet it is to be feared that it has done much, in its time, to harden ''scientific sense against the just complaints of the victims of human arrogance and oppression. Let me here quote a most impressive passage from Scliopenhauer. The unpardonable forgetfulness in which the lower animals have hitherto been left by the argument is, that if we accept the immortality of the human soul, and also accept its evolutional origin, we cannot deny the sur- vival, in some form or other, of animal minds. ^ G. J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence. Prof. Huxley's re- marks, in Science and Culture, give a partial support to Des- cartes' theory, but do not bear on the moral question of rights. For, though he concludes that animals are probably '' sensitive automata, he classes men in the same category.