Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/663

Rh of this lack of effectiveness in the enforcement of a divine decree, it has been asserted that man lost his dominion over the lower world to a great extent when he lost dominion over himself; but this view is wholly untenable even from a biblical standpoint, inasmuch as the promise of universal sovereignty was renewed after the deluge and expressed in even stronger terms than before the fall.

Dugald Stewart admits "a certain latitude of action, which enables the brutes to accommodate themselves in some measure to their accidental situations." In this arrangement he sees a design or purpose of "rendering them, in consequence of this power of accommodation, incomparably more serviceable to our race than they would have been if altogether subjected, like mere matter, to the influence of regular and assignable causes." Of the value of this power of adaptation to the animal itself in the struggle for existence the Scotch philosopher had no conception.

In the great majority of treatises on moral science, especially in such as base their teachings on distinctively Christian tenets, there is seldom any allusion to man's duty toward animals. Dr. Wayland, who has perhaps the most to say on this point, sums up his remarks in a note apologetically appended to the body of his work. He denies them the possession of "any moral faculty," and declares that in all cases "our right is paramount and must extinguish theirs." We are to treat them kindly, feed and shelter them adequately, and "kill them with the least possible pain." To inflict suffering upon them for our amusement is wrong, since it tends to harden men and render them brutal and ferocious in temper.

Dr. Hickok takes a similar view and broadly asserts that "neither animate nor inanimate Nature has any rights," and that man is not bound to it "by any duties for its own sake. . . . In the light of his own worthiness as end. . . . he is not permitted to mar the face of Nature, nor wantonly and uselessly to injure any of her products." Maliciously breaking a crystal, defacing a gem, girdling a tree, crushing a flower, painting flaming advertisements on rocks, and worrying and torturing animals are thus placed in the same category as acts tending to degrade man ethically and aesthetically, rendering him coarse and rude, and making him not only a very disagreeable associate, but also, in the long run, "an unsafe member of civil society." These things are considered right or wrong solely from the standpoint of their influence upon human elevation or degradation. "Nature possesses no product too sacred for man. All Nature is for man, not man for it."

Man is as truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal, and this attempt to set him up on an isolated point outside of it is philosophically false and morally pernicious. It makes