Page:The moral aspects of vivisection (IA 101694999.nlm.nih.gov).pdf/16

 purchase immunity from our own diseases at the most of the torture of a hundred dogs, we may be pardoned for doubting whether the vivisevtor who eats them up (as he assures us) for our sakes, is really more interested on our behalf than we are for ourselves.

I believe, then, that we may not unjustifiably fall back on the conclusion that the real motives of vivisectors are of one or other of two less exalted kinds. The better class we may credit with a sincere ardor for Science, and that passion which has been well named the Dilettanteism of Discovery. And these belong precisely to that order of hommes a grands desseins, who are more than any others liable to overstep the bounds of justice and mercy, and who more than others need the intervention of the social conscience to cheek their recklessness. For a lower class we must, I fear, take the word of a man who worked for four months among them, in a laboratory where from one to three dogs were sacrificed daily: "The idea of the good of humanity was simply out of the question, and would have been laughed at; the great aim being to keep up with or go ahead of our contemporaries in science, even at the price of an incalculable amount of needless torture to animals.

But the motives which actually influence living vivisectors do not, of course, determine the ethical lawfulness of the practice of vivisection. Our real problem is, whether the highest end to which it may conduce, and which they may possibly contemplate,—viz, either the direct benefit of mankind by special discovery, or the indirect benefit by the general advancement of science—morally justifies the