Anti Vivisectionists

"Consciousness arises with, or out of, and accompanies, these clay compounds called creatures, but it does not cause, nor in any way interfere with, their phenomena. If it were possible to construct artificial clods, chemically as accomplished as philosophers, but without any accompanying consciousness, these soulless mechanisms, without will, feeling, or conscious intelligence, simply acting out their chemical and physical affinities, would not behave otherwise in any infinitesimal particular than the real, conscious meditators on things."

"Human beings are bigots and egoists almost to a creature. They are so because their phyletic environment has fancied this disgusting cut of consciousness. And the only possible way to attain, with anything like alacrity, any other pattern is by means of an environment with an enlightened and inextinguishable dislike for the prevailing style of things. Let this truth be distinctly and profoundly realized. It is the essential spark of the illumination. If we would bloom into beings of beauty and light, we must acquire an environment which will insist on beings of beauty and light as the mammas and papas of posterity."

"The twofold function of individual culture is so to develop beings that they shall be able to perceive their proper relations to the rest of the uiniverse, to the inanimate about them, and to other beings in space and time, and realizing their relations to others, to be disposed to assume them."

"I am a vegetarian because I believe that present-day ethics is founded on that puerile, pre-Darwinian delusion that all other kinds of creatures and all worlds were created explicitly for the hominine species. Vegetarianism is the ethical corollary of evolution. It is simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin. Evolution has taught us the kinship of all creatures."

"I am a vegetarian, therefore, because cannibalism is unnecessary. I can live just as well and be just as happy without drinking the blood of my fellows, and why should I slay them? Why should I not live and let live—especially when I can do it just as well as not? It is not necessary that ten thousand creatures should give up their lives in order that I may keep mine, and if I make any pretensions to morality why should I require them to do it? If you say such a thing is necessary in your case, I say to you it is not—and further, that if it were, it would be your duty as an ethical being to call on your undertaker. There is no sense in carnivora talking about ethics and justice and mercy, for their very existence is a travesty on such things. It makes me indignant and sad when I hear men deplore sin and prate about justice and love and mercy, when the very energy they expend in preaching justice and mercy is obtained from the skeletons and sensibilities of their fellows. It is a spectacle that ought to make the imps of netherdom tremble for their laurels—man, the remorseless glutton, going about with a tongue and a knife, with his tongue preaching peace, mercy, and love, and with his knife making the very earth sodden with blood."

"We are striving for the amelioration of this suffering world. Let us be economical."

"No being knows. He thinks he knows. A few grams strategically shifted here and there in his organism, and he knows, or thinks he knows, something altogether otherwise. All is attitude and relativity."

"Man's desires are, indeed, innumerable, often hopeless, and sometimes vile, but they may all be rolled together into two: the desire to avoid pain, and the desire to experience pleasure. Every conscious movement made by living beings, from oyster to philosopher, is directed toward the accomplishment of one or both of these ends."

"The satisfaction of the much stigmatized animal propensities," or carnal desires," whatever they are, may be just as exemplary and noble as the satisfaction of the desire for knowledge or opulence; and they are, in fact, frequently more so. The only rational characterization of a low desire is one incapable of yielding to the universe in its satisfaction large returns of happiness. And a high desire is simply one affording to the universe in its satisfaction wide and profound welfare. The only reason why any desire, so-called "high" or so-called low," should be kept in abeyance is that its satisfaction will not contribute to the utilities. There is no reason why any desire capable of satisfaction possessed by a living being should not be satisfied, except that its satisfaction may interfere with the satisfaction of other more valuable desires possessed by the being himself or by other beings."

"Every pain is to be avoided, except those whose endurance will enable the avoidance of greater pain, and every possible happiness is to be harvested, save those whose foregoing will help the universe to larger happiness. There is no obligation commanding any being to endure misery save to avoid misery, and no consideration demanding any one to neglect happiness save for larger happiness—those ascetics who proclaim the divinity of wretchedness to the contrary notwithstanding."

"Man, in satisfying his desires, in avoiding misery and achieving happiness, strives to do two things with the inanimate universe: to manage it and to foreknow it. The inanimate is not devoted to us. We are not birdlings cuddled in an order of things where we need simply to yawn and be filled. We must bestir ourselves, or be in a position to compel others to bestir themselves for us, or perish. We are waifs, brought into existence by a universe whose solicitude for us ended with the travail that brought us forth. The inanimate universe is our mother, but without the blessed mother-love. The first thing we are conscious of, and about the only thing we ever absolutely know, is that we are whirling around in a very helpless manner on a whirligig of a ball, out of whose substance by the sweat of our brows we must quarry our existence. The universe is practically independent of us. But we, alas, are not independent of it. The food we eat, our raiment, our habitations, our treasures, our implements of knowledge, and our means of amusement are all portions of the inanimate, which we living beings must somehow subtract from the rest. In order to obtain these indispensable portions of the universe about us, we must halter it and control it and compel it to produce to the tune of our desires."

"So the disinherited loan themselves to the possessors of things, the landlords and the capitalists, who allow to them a rental for the use of their bodies. The industrial system which allows the unlimited appropriation of land and inventions furnishes to the more powerful and avaricious classes of communities the means by which they compel the rest to labor for them. And not to call such deprivation slavery is to neglect to use the word with its most essential connotation."

"I became a vegetarian by my own reflection. I did not know at the time of the vegetarian movement, and hence, supposed myself among republics of carnivora. It did not seem to me graceful or ideal that I, an ethical being should maintain my existence at the incessant expense of misery and death to others."

"The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible reformation with the gentlest and most strategic deprivation."

"[This work] would be inexcusable to suppose it to be exhaustive. It is not even defensive. It is a projectile, and projectiles do not apologize. It intends to be followed."

"The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at which one generation adores become to the succeeding desolate and despised."

"The animate environment has been the most formidable factor in the evolution of mundane life. The inanimate has been indifferent. The animate has not been so. It has been relentless. While the ages were yet tender, life began to riot upon life, and it has continued to do so to this moment. Where the inanimate has slain and selected one, the animate has slain multitudes. It is estimated that the life process is now about twenty millions of years old. Its existence has been one unbroken bacchanal of blood. Aggregate has preyed upon aggregate and species has decimated species. Tides of irresponsibles have swept over the continents and thru the deeps, collided, grappled, and exterminated each other. What is hidden in the horrible chasm between monera and man, no fancy will ever illume. It is the mighty charnal of creation. The skeletons of two millions of exterminated species of living beings are there with all their unimaginable accompaniments—wars, blacknesses, frightful manglings, eclipses, horrible concussions, inextinguishable malignities, hell."

"The criminal should be considered and pitied, not despised. He simply complies with the nature with which he came into the world, modified by the environment in which he has lived, the same as does every other being who breathes. You or I, with identical heredity and environment, would do identical deeds. Measured by his ability to do otherwise, the villain is not less divine than the humanitarian. Every creature acts out the impulses which arise in his own consciousness, and the will cannot create, but simply registers, those impulses. Punishment is one of the means possessed by society for its self-culture, and its administration should not be made an opportunity for pugilistic cocks to color their spurs."

"This is a gray world. There is enough sorrow in it, even though we cease to scourge each other—the sorrow of floods, famines, fires, earthquakes, storms, diseases, and death. We should trust each other, and love each other, and sympathize with and help each other, and be patient and forgiving."

"The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. Oh, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. Oh my mother! and Oh my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever."

"For it must be remembered that there was a time when no set of beings tyrannized and terrorized the planet as do the reigning cutthroats to-day. Estimate finally, if you can, and history will help you, the amount of bloodshed and war and woe necessary to develop those unfinished Troglodytes into beings clever enough to write history and invent gin and originate the hope of heaven. Compute these totalities, and you will know what it has cost to teach you and me and the rest to talk politics and wax sarcastic with our fore limbs in the air. Question: If it has required two or three millions of species struggling for life twenty millions of years to produce a being barely above derision, how long will it take and how many millions of species to evolve a being as nearly divine as the average man thinks he is?"

"Religion has had a natural origin, like coal, and rock salt, and mountains, and river valleys, and everything else. It has been made in the laboratory of human feeling and imagination. The gods did not make men; men made the gods."

"Religion is essentially pre-scientific. It will pass away. It represents a certain stage of mental development. It has been tinkered with and tinkered with until it is about ready for the scrap heap. The more men know of chemistry and physics and evolution and natural law, the less use they have for supernaturalism. No true scientist can pray. Prayer is unscientific. No evolutionist can believe in the divine origin of anything."

"The inanimate is the fundamental of things, the substratum upon which the possibilities rear themselves. Before life was, it was, and it will be when life's last inertia is spent. Out of its mysterious parts the life process came, and upon its hard herbage and by the grace of its scanty tolerances it survives. The inanimate is the mighty trellis about whose inhospitable parts the tendrils of sentiency creep. It is the riddle, the catastrophe, and the sine qua non of the enterprise of consciousness. The inanimate is and has always been indifferent to life, and for this reason it has been indefatigable in its selections. It has no ears for distress, no eyes for injustice, and no sympathy for the unsophisticated. Its hardships, of food, climate, and cataclysm have entered with tireless energy into the destinies of the consciousnesses. It must have been some unprecedented scarcity of nutrition that originated that coarse and fearful manifestation of egoism, carnivorousness."

"If this ball is ever other than a globule of alloy, if the universe ever experiences the long longed for millennium of prophecy and hope, all must come thru the reformed and glorified gateway of the womb. Individual, or post-natal, reformation is, and must always be, more or less imperfect. It is powerless in determining the nature with which beings come into the world, and it is ineffectual in modifying it after it is determined."

"Parenthood is the gravest of all responsibilities. The act of generation is a momentous act. It should be illuminated. It should be more serious, and deliberate, and conscious. It should be far more frequently neglected. Human beings should know that it is a grave conspiracy, the conspiracy to bring into the universe a living being, an organism with lungs and responsibilities and the faculty for being affected. Would-be parents should ascertain whether or not they are undertaking the dissemination of disease and crime among future generations. For society not to know, nor care to know, and not to determine, nor care to determine, the character of purposed contributions to a new generation, would seem amazing, were we not born looking upon it. Were we accustomed to accomplished and scientific procreation, our indiscriminate somnambulism would scarce wear the aspects of sanity."

"From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed egoist."

"Religion is a strictly human infirmity. No other animal has it. It originated far back in the past, when the human world was young and the mind just beginning to open. It is an anachronism today, with our science and understanding. It survives solely by the force of tradition."

"I sit here tonight in this great city and think back along the years. Life is so full and so different now – full of teaching, writing and problem solving. But, oh, those precious memories away back there in the morning! The prairies are gone, where we used to gather wild strawberries and tiger lilies, but the old school house still stands, I am told, where the High Bank lifts its formidableness above the singing stream."

"Since impulses are simply sensations which have become motor, and since sensations are only tendencies from without become conscious, the nature of any being may be said to be the manner in which it correlates the tendencies which it contacts, or the manner in which a being, as a distinct and detached portion of the universe, reacts upon the rest of the universe."

"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."

"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."

"And what is it to act upon others as you would that others would act upon you? It is to put yourself in the place of others. It is consideration of others as ardent as consideration of self. It is the balancing of abilities, supplementation, the social ideal."

"An ox is of a very different nature from a fox, and men (some of them) are very unlike serpents, because the classes of impulses in the consciousnesses of these animals are for the most part very different in one animal from another. Serpents, oxen, foxes, and men, however, are all similar in their eagerness to reproduce themselves, and in their emphatic reluctance to die."

"There is no sympathy, no consciousness of kind, no realization that the emotions experienced by that valiant little creature struggling to avoid the mouths of those instinct-maddened dogs are similar to the emotions they themselves would experience in an identical predicament."

"Sympathy, consciousness of kind, means simply the realization or the conscious recognition by living beings of the kinship of content. A human being unconscious of kind, an unsympathetic and inhuman person, is one who is likely to assume that his conscious states are sui generis, that they are more precious and intense than, and intrinsically different from, those of others—one who realizes that an injured sensory is a savage thing in his own organism, but who does not suppose it to be anything of the kind when it hangs to the brain of a Hottentot or a horse. Why do the human rich treat the human poor with such inconsideration? Why do they allow or compel them to remain disinherited and crushed while they themselves loll in superfluous wealth? Because there is Inadequate consciousness of kind."

"There is a kinship of all beings, for the life process has sprung from one source and evolved according to one fundamental principle. Consciousness of kind, therefore, the ability to participate in the psychic states of others, is cultivated by a knowledge of the nature and content of those around us, and anything which tends to increase or complete our knowledge of others, as identity of language, association, or ambition, tends to intensify consciousness of kind, and whatever limits or prevents knowledge of others tends to cause us to consider them of a different order or kind from ourselves."

"Why are non-human beings ostracized and treated by humans with no consideration save as they administer to selfish human ends? Whence the doctrine that non-human species were made for the hominine species, and that there is no logic or sanity in their existence save as they feed or slave for their human tyrants? Because they are dumb, that is, because their language is not understood by human minds, and because they are wild, that is, because they are for the most part unassociated with human animals, and because the civilized consciousness, which is barely able to realize the kinship of human beings, is yet too feeble and rudimentary to comprehend the solidarity of all beings."

"Inconsideration by human beings toward the rest of sentients is an aspect of that vast unconsciousness which taught that blacks were made for whites, females for males, and barbarians" for Romans."

"The evolution of consciousness, in its ethical import, means the extension in both space and time of the consciousness of similarity. Starting from individual egoism, consciousness has extended, vividly or vaguely, from individual self to family, and from family to clan, and from clan to tribe, and from tribe to nation, and from nation to race, and from race to species, and from species to kingdom. This amplification has gone on and is still going on in both space and time. Universal consciousness of similarity contemplates all the beings in space and all those to be in time."

"The sad and unmistakable thing one observes in looking out over the universe of conscious existence is the preponderance of egoism, the intense and almost maniacal regard with which beings, as a rule, act in behalf of themselves, and the lukewarm consideration, on the whole, allowed to others."

"The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged faithfully all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish."

"Oh, universe! Pitiful spectacle! Aggregation of tragedy, somnambulism, inhumanity, terrorism, and death! It makes one long to seal up his sensibilities and leap out into the gulfs and be swallowed up. The handiwork of an all-wise biophilist? Rhapsody of an idiot! Gods? No! The monstrous kindergarten of an idle-pated knave! A Satanic prank! The surreptitious handiwork of an ass! A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession."

"Women are everywhere systematically deprived of privileges which men have fought and bled and died to obtain for themselves. In many lands a woman legally ceases to exist the day she is wed—if she ever existed before. Man has always been, and is to-day, the race, and woman his shadow."

"Look at the manner in which the aborigines are swept away from continent after continent by the sword and beverage of the Aryans. See how the red children of America have been cheated and debauched and driven from homes where they and their fathers had lived from immemorial generations. When the banner of Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, America was inhabited by a noble, magnanimous, and happy people. They were not like the sodden, suspicious, revengeful remnants that to-day huddle on barricaded reserves, the vindictive survivors of four centuries of injustice. They were kind and generous. They came to the invading Europeans as children, with minds of wonder and with hands filled with presents. They were treated by the invaders like refuse. They were plundered, and their outstretched hands cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. They are gone from the valleys where once their camp-smokes curled to heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle the moonlight of the rivers no more. They that remain are too weak to rise in warlike challenge to the aggressions of the mighty white. But the story of the meeting of the pale and the red, and of the wrongs of the vanquished red, will remain as one of the mournful tales of this world when the kindred of Lo, like fleecy clouds, have melted into the infinite azure of the past.""

"Look at human industry! See the pounds of flesh daily torn by men everywhere from the skeletons of each other in the awful riot of business." Just look at it! The inequity, the unconsciousness, the hard-heartedness, the ruffianism, and the infernalism of the industrial relations and conditions of men! Watch an unfortunate approach a rich man's mansion and ask in the most graceful manner for a necessary of life. Observe the egoism the baron shows as he sends the sufferer away unfed. See the lord in his marble palace, upholstered with all the comforts of civilization and stuffed with the dainties of the zones, and around him the men and women who made his wealth feeding on garbage, suffocating in shanties, and working like wretches from morning till night. See the multi-millionaire, scraping the palms of his slaves till the blood starts for the last farthing their struggles have produced, not because he is hungry and would buy, but because he is a ruffian and can. No attention whatever is paid to the fact that some have all they can utilize in the satisfaction of their desires and multiples more, while others just as good-looking and more worthy have nothing. No attention is paid to the fact that this little pill of a world is to man the only accessible portion of the universe; that he is cut off from other balls by leagues of impassable space."

"The weak submit because they are helpless and because they are ignorant, because they are incarcerated and disarmed, and because they have been taught and intimidated into believing that the conventional and the legal, whatever they are, have been ordained and established by the immeasurable manufacturer of things."

"A more pyramidal farce could not be framed at the present stage of the human imagination than that of human industry—the immense privilege and monopoly and the immense flatulence of wealth side by side with the most helpless and sickening deprivation—all brought about and perpetuated by hypocrites who lapse into hysterics over the injunction, "What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.""

"The earliest examples of human association were those practically of autocentricism. Each individual considered himself the only or chief end for which the universe existed. Each's own individual welfare was the end for which he struggled, and all the rest of the universe, sentient and insentient, was contemplated as means to this."

"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."