The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. O, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. O my mother! and O 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.
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.
One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the 'idols (or illusions) of the tribe' by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up.
The most hopeless chains are those of which we are unconscious. The darkest slavery is that which binds the human brain.
The inhabitants of the earth are bound to each other by the ties and obligations of a common kinship. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree, but not in kind, from the beings below, above, and around him.
The Great Law of Love—the abstaining from that which we do not like when done to ourselves—Reciprocity—is the only relation to exist among associated beings of any kind.
Many races, owing to the manner in which life has been evolved, are by nature criminal, just like a lot of individual men and women. Their existence is a continual menace to the peace and well-being of the world. The fullness of their lives is dependent upon the emptiness and destruction of others. The mosquito and the tiger, the rattle-snake and the 'sportsman,' are criminals of this kind. The same thing is true of predatory animals generally.
The great trouble is that individuals and races in their treatment of each other are not guided by the same high standards of impartiality as an individual organism in dealing with his own organs and parts. Life is not one. It lacks unity of feeling and purpose. And as long as it lacks this oneness it will lack justice.
If man acted unkindly toward non-human beings only when he had to do so in order to avoid harm to himself—if he were as economical in his injuries to others as he would be if he had to endure them himself—the violence which to-day marks his dominion of the planet would be reduced to a mere vestige of what it is.
Vacation days may be much more beautifully spent communing with the transcendent spirit of Nature than in the butchery and terrorisation of her simple-hearted children.
In the ideal universe the life and happiness of no being are contingent on the suffering and death of any other, and the fact that in this world of ours life and happiness have been and are to-day so commonly maintained by the infliction of misery and death by some beings on others is the most painful fact that ever entered an enlightened mind.
The earth has been headquarters for bigots from time immemorial. I suspect that if we had information from the stars and were able to judge the spheres of space comparatively, we would find that the earth is head and shoulders above every other world within the sweep of the telescope in the enormous output of its assurance.
"Wild animals" merely strangers to us—beings who live apart from and independent of us. They suffer and enjoy the same as we do. They have their own ends and justifications of life.
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.
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.