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Great Testimony against scientific cruelty By: Stephen Coleridge (1854-1936) |
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GREAT TESTIMONY
AGAINST SCIENTIFIC CRUELTY
:: COLLECTED AND EDUCED BY ::
THE HONBLE. STEPHEN COLERIDGE
WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVIII [Picture: Thomas Carlyle. From a drawing by Samuel Laurence in the
collection of John Lane] PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
PREFACE
If the support of great and good men, famous throughout Christendom, will
avail to justify a cause, then indeed we who would utterly abolish the
torture of animals by vivisection can never be put out of countenance. Difficult would it be indeed to bring together the authority of so many
resounding reputations against any other act of man, since slavery was
abolished. The poets, philosophers, saints and seers of England have united to
anathematise it as an abomination, and as a deed only possible to a
craven. It seems strange that in the face of such authentic condemnation the
horrid practice has not disappeared off the face of the civilised earth,
until it is observed that it has received the shameless support of
science, which for two generations has usurped an authority over conduct
for which it possesses no credentials. The modern prostration of mankind
before science is a vile idolatry. In the realm of ethics science is not
constructive but destructive. It exalts the Tree of Knowledge and
depresses the Tree of Life. How is the character of man elevated or purified by all the maddening
inventions of science? How indeed! Are we made better men by being
whirled about the globe by machinery, by the increased opportunities for
limitless volubility, or by the ingenious devices for mutual destruction?
And how are we morally advantaged by the knowledge of the infinite depths
of space, the composition of the stars and the motions of the planets? The old Persian, when his far travelled offspring returned with these
wonders to tell, replied: "My son, thou sayest that one star spinneth
about another star; let it spin!" And Ruskin once remarked: "Newton explained why an apple fell, but he
never thought of explaining the exactly correlative, but infinitely more
difficult question, how the apple got up there." The dead and dreary law of gravitation made it fall, but the glorious law
of life, known only to God, drew it up out of the earth and hung it in
all its inexplicable wonder high in the air. And I think herein is a very good parable applicable to ourselves and our
age. Science has found out that everything in the Universe is falling towards
everything else, or trying to do so, and we are so absorbed in this
deciduous discovery that we have forgotten to look up and observe the
lovely things about us that by God's mercy have still escaped the
withering touch of scientific knowledge. But Science has now moved beyond the comparatively innocuous accumulation
of mechanical discoveries, and advancing into the domain of morals, has
emerged in the sinister aspect of the defender of cruelty. This may yet prove an usurpation that will lead to its ultimate
deposition and ignominy. A time is coming when mankind will have no ear
for the advocates of what all the great and good and wise have denounced
as wicked. If Science comes before the world declaring that cruelty is necessary for
its advance, the world will one day tell Science that it can stop where
it is. In the meanwhile that there can be no doubt in the mind of any man as to
how the greatest leaders of thought and loftiest teachers of conduct have
united in their condemnation of vivisection, I have thought it timely to
bring them together, a noble array, in this book.
CHAPTER I: THE SEVENTH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, K.G.
FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI VIVISECTION SOCIETY
[Picture: The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K... Continue reading book >>
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