Anti Vivisectionists

"Men have had the same origin as other animals; they have the same general architecture of body and mind; and they have the same destiny. And they stand on the same general level of ethical claim and obligation."

"The trouble with all ethical systems of this world has been their partiality. They have been arranged with undue regard for those who invented them. And this defect vitiates the prevailing systems to-day as it has vitiated the systems that have been produced in times gone by."

"The same general moral code applies to every being that feels. In a general way, whatever is right to human beings is right also to non-human beings; and whatever is wrong to human beings is wrong to non-human beings. There are disparities everywhere—disparities in ethical standing, just as there are disparities in usefulness and feeling-power. But there are no greater disparities between men and other animals than there are between different individuals or varieties of the human species. I do not say nor do I believe that a guinea-pig has the same rights to life and to the satisfaction of its desires as an Englishman has. Neither has an Eskimo. But I do say that an ethical system that treats guinea pigs and non-humans generally with the ethical indifference that they receive to-day is a product of human provincialism pure and simple and is destined to become as obsolete as human slavery with the blooming of the ages."

"Science has many things to answer for that it is not guilty of. Many things are done in the name of "science" because those who do them are ashamed to acknowledge their real motives. Roosevelt shot monkeys and antelopes in Africa in the name of "science," but his real motives are known to have been much lower."

"If I were making a world and could arrange it as I wanted to, only humanitarians would be allowed to practice vivisection. Only those would be allowed to practice it who would be as economical in inflicting pain on others as they would be in inflicting it on themselves. Vivisection in the hands of those without sympathy, in the hands of those who are still in the mists of anthropocentrism, will always be abused, will always be, what it is to-day, largely a pastime and a hobby."

"No wonder the child loves the camp-fire. The camp-fire was the ancestor of the hearth—the first bright spot in that dark world out of which our forefathers groped their way so long ago."

"These races of beings which man has associated with himself are living beings. They eat and drink and breathe, they suffer and enjoy, reproduce their kind and love their young, much as human beings do. They have been taken from their natural surroundings and forced to adopt ways of living that are often cruel, or even horrible. There is nothing much more certain than that men and women of the far future will recognize their kinship with these races, and will treat them in an entirely different way from what we do."

"Mother love is not a human invention. It has been inherited. It is older than the Rocky Mountains. Mother love in man came from the same source as the backbone in man from pre-human forms. Mother love among men is the same thing exactly as mother love among birds and quadrupeds. The mother monkey loves her child with almost the same tenderness as the human mother. When a monkey child dies, the mother carries the little corpse around with her for clays, refuses to eat, and sits often in silence and grief. Mother birds will risk their very lives for their young. So will mother bears, and lions, and whales, and the females of many other species."

"As time passes and society assumes more and move the care of the young, it is probable that the love of parents for their own children will grow weaker. Parents will develop a feeling of regard for children as a whole, and will not have that feeling of partiality which they today have so much, for their own children. Society is in many ways better fitted to look after its young than are individual parents. Society today carries on the education of the child, providing school houses, teachers, and in some cases even books and meals. All of these things were formerly done by parents themselves, that is, in a "private" rather than in a "public" way. And future times will no doubt see still further advances along these same lines."

"Young sheep and goats leap and gambol in their play. I have noticed young goats that were being led along the streets keep up an occasional jumping as they went along, leaping first one way then another, sometimes straight up into the air, as if they were worked by some unseen spring that went off suddenly inside of them. How strange such conduct must have seemed to the pre-Darwinians. But to the evolutionists it is as plain as day."

"Human beings are not children of the sun. They are children of the jungle. We have in our natures many things that we would be a great deal better off without instincts and ways of acting which we would never have included in ourselves in the world if we had had the privilege of choosing just what was to go into our natures. These instincts and ways of acting are vestigial. They were useful to our ancestors, but owing to changes in surroundings they are not useful to us."

"The animal kingdom has been reared in a gory cradle."

"Progress is not natural. We are geared to go round and round. The reformer should not expect too much. We are only as far along as we are. It is the nature of granite to be hard. And it is the nature of man to be mechanical."

"Imitation will not always be stronger than reason, but it is today."

"[O]ur bodies do not generate energy in sufficient abundance for us to regard labor as a blessing. We don't work, as a rule, because we would rather work than not. We work because we would rather work than starve. Labor is a sort of necessary evil. We endure it because it is not so bad as some other things we would have to undergo if we didn't work. To labor as men do in producing civilization in producing the food, houses, machinery, and luxuries of modern peoples is not natural in the present stage of development of the human machine. It is a strained and artificial expenditure. This is shown by our fondness for holidays, by our constant search for labor-saving machines, and by the fact that we are all the time looking forward to a Golden Age in our lives when we can lead a life of leisure. We generally classify toil with trouble and tears with the evil things of life, not with the good things. The Happy Places that men dream of for themselves after death are invariably places where there is not much work to do."

"Humanitarianism is the name commonly given to that higher humanity which embraces the whole animal kingdom, or as much of it as gives evidence of feeling. Humanitarianism is the final goal of human sympathy. Starting with the tribe (or the family, or even the individual), the instinct of sympathy has spread from tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to nation, from nation to race, and from race to species. It is constantly growing and deepening among the sub-divisions of the human species and is as constantly extending to the non-human populations of the earth. It is destined finally to reach the remotest shores of the Great Ocean of Feeling. Wherever there are bodies that bleed and souls that mourn, there human sympathy should go, angel-like, with its sweetness and healing down even to those lowly and overlooked but suffering-and-enjoying civilizations beneath our feet, in the grasses and grounds and the crystal deeps."

"Our competitive system of industry is a vestigial institution. It is a survival from the militant ages of the past. It is a form of warfare. It is unsuited to a world of co-operation and division of labor. Higher men are beings of sympathy. They have the natures to put themselves in the places of others. Their ideal is the Golden Rule. But our system of industry compels us to fight each other. It is a heart-hardener. It is a system of cannibalism. Instead of instilling the feeling of brotherhood, it compels us to eat each other. It will pass away. It is already far advanced in its transition to a system based on sympathy and systematic co-operation."

"Everywhere we turn we find evidence that the "civilization," so-called, of higher peoples is a made-over something, and that the antecedent thing from which it has been derived is the "civilization" of the savage. In this derived "civilization" we find everywhere features of the old, antecedent, and disappearing order of things customs, laws, beliefs, languages, ideals, and institutions which are now no longer functional, but which survive in a more or less dwindling condition in obedience to the same laws as those which perpetuate the vermiform appendix and the hairy covering of our bodies and the hunting and fighting instincts of our natures. It is of vast advantage to us to be able to recognize these vestigial features, in order that we may more skilfully disentangle ourselves from them and at the same time definitely turn our backs on them in our efforts to advance toward a Better World."

"[The Universal Kinship] has furnished me several days of deep pleasure and satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and irascibly for me."

"I do not know of any book [The Universal Kinship] dealing with evolution that I have read with such keen interest. Mr. Moore has a broad grasp and shows masterly knowledge of the subject. And withal the interest never flags. The book reads like a novel. One is constantly keyed up and expectant. Mr. Moore is to be congratulated upon the magnificent way in which he has made alive the dull, heavy processes of the big books. And, then, there is his style. He uses splendid virile English and shows a fine appreciation of the values of words. He uses always the right word."

"It is impossible for me to express my appreciation of your masterly work [The Universal Kinship]. It is simply great, and every socialist and student of sociology should read it."

"[The Universal Kinship] leaves me in a glow of enthusiasm and hope. It seems like the embodiment of years of almost despairing effort and pain of all of us who have felt these things. That which we have been thinking and feeling—some in one direction and some in another, some in fuller understanding and breadth, others in little flashes of insight here and there—all seems gathered together, expressed, and given form and color and life in your wonderful book."

"It is not too much to say that all that should be said, all that can be said, all that any one of us thinks he would like to say, is said in this book [The Universal Kinship] [...] nothing that I have ever yet read has so brought home to me the whole question of my relationship to and personal responsibility for the subhuman creation."

"This man, our brother, never purposely killed a living thing until he put the pistol to his head. Poor dead dreamer, you are not the first or last mortal to learn the truth [...] I have dreamed my dreams, had my illusions and wakened from my sleep. Why do I not follow him? I do not end it all because the love of life and the shrinking fear of death in all living things stays my hand and my courage fails."

"John Howard Moore wrote and worked with feverish haste, and he believed that the blind and heartless world would listen to his words and mend its ways. But humanity went on trading and dickering, lying and cheating, marrying and dying, and never heard his voice. One day he opened his eyes and knew his work was in vain, and feeling the weight of the universal sorrow on his soul, he took his life. The coroner's jury determined that "he died from his own hand, while suffering under a temporary fit of insanity." I tell you he died from his own hand while suffering under a temporary fit of sanity [...] Poor, dead dreamer! You are not the first or last mortal to learn the truth. Other men have awakened from the mad and blissful dream of saving mankind from itself. I, too, have dreamed my dreams, had my illusions, and wakened from my sleep [...] Among all who are gathered here there is but one whom we can felicitate on this event, and that one is our friend who lies peaceful and all unconscious of the world. If any word of mine could call back his troubled soul, I should feel myself guiltier far than I would to cause a brother's death."

"Indeed, all his works are replete with the sublimest thoughts and inspirations, and the least that we, as Comrades, can do as proof of our mission to spread "enlightenment is first, to acquaint ourselves with Professor Moore's books, and secondly, to pass the knowledge on to others. Thus his efforts shall not have been in vain."

"Perhaps the most able of all vindications of humane principles is that contained in Mr. Howard Moore's The Universal Kinship, published by the League in 1906. It was through a notice which I wrote in the Humanitarian of an earlier book of his, Better-World Philosophy, that the League first came into association with him; and I remember with shame that when that "sociological synthesis," as its sub-title proclaimed it to be, first came into my hands, I nearly left it unread, suspecting it to be but the latest of the many wearisome ethical treatises that are a scourge to the reviewer, to whom the very word "sociology" or "synthesis" is a terror. But fortunately I read the book, and quickly discovered its merits; and from that time, till his death in 1916, Howard Moore was one of the truest and tenderest of our friends, himself prone to despondency and, as his books show, with a touch of pessimism, yet never failing in his support and encouragement of others and of all humanitarian effort. "What on earth would we Unusuals do, in this lonely dream of life," so he wrote in one of his letters, "if it were not for the sympathy and friendship of the Few?""

"In The Universal Kinship, Howard Moore left to humanitarians a treasure which it will be their own fault if they do not value as it deserves. There is a tendency to forget that it is to modern evolutionary science that the ethic of humaneness owes its strongest corroboration. The physical basis of the humane philosophy rests on the biological fact that kinship is universal. Starting from this admitted truth, Moore showed, with much wealth of argument and epigram, that the supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human has no more existence, apart from the imagination of man. than the physical gulf which has now been bridged by science. The purpose of our movement was admirably stated by him: "to put science and humanitarianism in place of tradition and savagery." It was with that aim in view that our League of Humaneness had been formed."

"I have a theory that we judge best of the reality of friendships in absence; and if this be true, I cannot have been mistaken as to the warmth of my feelings for Howard Moore, for I never saw him in person, though we corresponded regularly for years, and I have still a big packet of his letters which show him to have been no less lovable as a man than he was brilliant as a writer."

"I have long thought that Moore's chief book, The Universal Kinship, the gist of which is clearly expressed in the title, is the best ever written in the humanitarian cause."

"At times Moore strikes contemporary ethicists as rather ridiculous, arguing, for instance, against meat-eating even by wild animals. It is likely that Moore's ardent vegetarianism contributed to this attitude."

"No country is without popular heroes. America has at least one. Like young Lochinvar he "has come out of the West." He is in Chicago at present. His name is J. Howard Moore [...] He became a hero by a book. It happened this way. One day the Illinois Legislature passed a bill compelling teachers to instruct their pupils in morals, thirty minutes a week. Forthwith there was a panic. Ladies' hearts fluttered and men's lips dropped naughty words. Nobody in Illinois knew how to teach morals. Nobody? Just one. J. Howard Moore."

"A carnivorous animal is not an ideal animal, and never can be. The life of a carnivorous animal is a perpetual onslaught. Every meal is a murder. Eating is not the harmless activity it is to one who sits down to fruit and grains. The carnivore must kill somebody, or have somebody else do it for him, in order to eat. It cannot be otherwise. And an animal whose life is one unbroken succession of such necessities, whose stomach is the grave of hundreds and thousands, and even of tens of thousands, of his fellow-beings, may be meritorious in other respects — may preach the Golden Rule, decry war, give money to the missionary, and rail at the rich — but so long as he continues to fill himself every few hours with the blood and vitals of others, he is not only not an ideal animal, but has in reality no just claims on life. Flesh is a painful form of nutrition for any organism, but it is especially so for man, because it is unnecessary, and because man makes so many pretensions and occupies a position in the world of such exceptional responsibility."

"There is nothing more frightful to the philosopher than the unconscious tragedies of human reason. Men are somnambulists. Stupefied by the long night of instinct out of which it arose, the human mind is only half awake to the world of reality and duty. George Washington was the father of his country, and a great and good man, but he held human beings as slaves, and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that "all men" includes Ethiopians; yet men who risked their lives in order to achieve personal and political liberty for black men, deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. A rich man will give millions of dollars to a museum or a university, when he would know, if he had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make his wealth work like slaves from morning till night, and feed on garbage and suffocate in garrets, in order that he may be munificent."

"We preach the Golden Rule with an enthusiasm that is well-nigh vehement, and then freckle the globe with huge murder-houses for the expeditious destruction of those who have as good a right to live as we have."

"It is simply monstrous, this horrible savagery and somnambulism in which we grope. It is the climax of mundane infamy—the "paragon of the universe" dozing on the pedestal of his imagination and contemplating himself as an interstellar pet and all other beings as commodities. Let us startle ourselves, those of us who can, to a realization of the holocaust we are perpetrating on our feathered and fur-covered friends. For remember the same sentiment of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man's manacles and is to-day melting the white woman's chains will to-morrow emancipate the sorrel horse and the heifer; and as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, all the races of the earth shall become kind, and this age of ours, so bigoted and raw, shall be remembered in history as an age of insanity, somnambulism, and blood."

"Well may we be dazed by the horrific metamorphosis. Dark days are upon us. The pendulum of civilization trembles, as if to swing back to the inglorious twilight of the past. Imperialistic tendencies are laying their damning clutches on the unsuspecting form of the republic. Fearful questions confront us. Whether we are to be compelled henceforth to read with downcast gaze the matchless axioms of Jefferson and to mumble in confusion the heroic history of our dead—whether the Fourth of July is to be henceforth a day of embarrassment and shame instead of, as hitherto, an occasion for spontaneous and boundless pride—whether Yorktown and Monmouth are to become events which, instead of inspiring a continent to eulogy and song, shall provoke no higher eloquence than that which gutturals from the limping lips of apology—whether the political wisdom of the founders of the republic, gleaned in terrible hours, by anxious eyes, from the travail of ages past, shall be swept away by the heartless levity of upstart statesmen—whether, in short, we shall turn our backs inexorably upon the past—a past glorious achievement and unrivaled in precept—and become the wretched exemplars of a policy, ruinous to ourselves and to our children, repulsive to every truly civilized mind and destructive of the fairest hopes of humanity—these. are questions that assail with relentless emphasis the consciences of a great people."

"I have just finished your little book on 'The Logic of Vegetarianism.' It is the best thing on this subject in existence – bold, brilliant, unanswerable. I am glad you are on earth. If it were not for a very few souls like you, this world would seem to me an intellectual solitude."

"Writing is so unnatural & hard for me that I have a good deal of difficulty in getting myself to undergo the hardship. It's a good deal like "sweating blood" for me. And unless I am driven by terrible feelings or convictions, I am inclined to go on & do nothing. I hate writing. It is the greatest hardship of my life. It seems to me I might be reasonably happy if I weren't everlastingly nagged by the obligation to perpetuate literary things on people."

"Poor Thomson! How melancholy & helpless. I believe in the perfect parallelism & correlation of the physical & psychical. The anomalous mentality, like that of James Thomson, is caused by some hidden defect in his physical machinery. And I believe that it is to be one of the triumphs of future surgery to rectify many of these soul malformations, such as poor helpless Thomson had to carry thru life."

"It is a fact of our world, tho, that Death is as inevitable as Birth. The coffin is as natural as the cradle."

"I cannot express myself when I get to thinking about these things—these terrible crimes that man is inflicting year after year on millions of his poor, helpless brothers. I become indignant and desperate. I am ashamed of the race of beings to which I belong. It is so cruel and bigoted, so hypocritical, so soul-less and insane. I'd rather be an insect—a bee or a butterfly—and float in dim dreams among the wild flowers of summer than be a man and feel the wrongs and sufferings of this wretched world."

"Is murder stripped of its blackness by become a fine art? All assassination is practically instantaneous and painless, the assassination of men as as well as that of birds and quadrupeds. What would the author of such nonsense think if the assassination of his brother or mother blandly attempted to relieve himself of all guilt by means of the assurance that his victim had experienced no suffering? The crime of extermination does not consist in the creation of pain, but in the destruction of that precious and mysterious essence called life."

"The ability to weigh the stars is all right, but it is not more important than the disposition to be just."

"We should be a little more disposed to move along. We live in a world that is neither petrified or perfect. The universe is a liquid. It is flowing. Humanitarianism is in the air."

"Human nature is defective. It is selfish. It is cruel and revengeful. It is a product of militancy and hate. It is much better adapted to a fighting life, in which it was generated, than it is in cooperation and peace."

"Every being is incomparably precious to himself. This is the most mournful feature in human psychology. We did not invent it. It was handed to us along with our fingers and our fondness fo eating. It is the psychic calamity of the animal kingdom."

"It is a crime to start a child learning to read and write as soon as it is out of the cradle. We should get ideas before starting on the business of representing them."

"Much of the vagueness of the human mind is due to the fact that the mind is largely composed of material derived second-hand from books. The ideas are not read."

"I came to the conclusion out there on the Kansas prairies that the animals were not treated right by human beings. I thought we had not even a right to kill them for food and came to the University of Chicago to study the matter. At that time I had never heard of vegetarianism."