contessa Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington Martinengo-Cesaresco

“ Of all the radiant dreams with which man has comforted his heart, aching with realities, is there one to be compared with this? It is of the earth earthly, and that is the beauty of it. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion together; and a little child shall lead them; the cow and the bear shall feed; and their young ones lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” ”

“ It is utterly impossible to escape from the consequences of our evil acts: they are debts which must be paid, though we may set about performing good acts which will make our future happiness exceed our future misery in time and extent. The highest good comes of itself, automatically, to him who merits it, as is illustrated with great beauty in the Jaina story of the White Lotus. This flower, the symbol of perfection, bloomed in the centre of a pool and was descried by many who made violent efforts to reach it, but they were all set fast in the mud. ”

“ The successors of the reindeer hunters, Turanian like them, but far more progressive, were the lake dwellers, the dolmen-builders, with their weaving and spinning, their sowing and reaping, their pottery and their baskets, their polished flints and their domestic animals. Man’s greatest achievement, the domestication of animals, had been reached in the unrecorded ages that divide the rough and the polished stone. Man, “excellent in art,” had mastered the beast whose lair is in the wilds; “he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck; he tames the tireless mountain bull.” ”

“ I remember seeing at the Hague an impressive painting by a little-known Italian artist [6] which represents Adam about to take the apple from Eve while at their feet a tiger tenderly licks the wool of a lamb. Adam’s face shows that he is yielding—yielding for no better reason than that he cannot say “No”—to the beautiful woman at his side; and there, unconscious and happy, lie the innocent victims of his act: love to be turned to wrath, peace to war. The Nature Peace has been painted a hundred times, but never with such tragic significance. ”

“ The moral aspects of any problem are those which to a moralist seem the most important, and Plutarch did not seek to deny the force of the objection: If virtue be the true aim of reason, how can Nature have bestowed reason on creatures which cannot direct it to its true object? But he denied the postulate that animals have no ethical potentialities. If the love of men for their children is granted to be the corner-stone of all human society, shall we say that there is no merit in the affection of animals for their offspring? ”

“ For I have made the dog, I who am Ahura Mazda!” To attack the dog was like an attack on the police. Slitting the ear of the house or sheep-dog out of malice, or cutting off his foot, or belabouring him so that thieves got at the sheep, were not unfrequent crimes and they are dealt with no more severely than they deserve. Who killed a house-dog outright, or a sheep-dog or personal dog or well-trained dog, was warned that in the next world his soul would go howling worse than a wolf in the depths of the forest ”

“ Though the story of the Hawk and the Pigeon may be used simply as a fairy tale, the moral of it is what forms the essential kernel of other-worldly religions. Through the mazes of Indian thought emerges the constant conviction—like a Divine sign-post—that martyrdom is redemption. The gods themselves are less than the man who resigns everything for what his conscience tells him to be right. Indra bows before Wusinara and seeks to learn the Law from him. India’s gods are Nature-gods, and Nature teaches no such lesson ”

“ All we gather of primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the air, it grew on branches and the branches grew on a trunk and the trunk had a root. To get to the root of even the slightest of our own prejudices—let alone those of the savage—we should have to travel back far into times when history was not.
Lucretius placed at the beginning of the ages of mankind a berry-eating race, innocent of blood. The second age belonged to the hunter who killed animals, at first, and possibly for a long time, for their skins, before he used their flesh as food. ”

“ The sweet lute-player who held entranced lion and lamb till the one forgot his wrath and the other his fear, was the natural symbol of the prototype of a humane religion.
Out of the nebulous patches of Greek enthusiasts who cherished tender feelings towards animals, emerges the intellectual sun of the Samian sage. It is difficult not to connect Pythagoras in some way with the Orphists, nor would such a connexion make it the less probable that he journeyed to the sacred East in search of fuller knowledge. ”

“ For years unnumbered the exploits of Rustem have entertained the Persian listener from prince to peasant, but the story will ever remain young because it is of those which reflect that which holds mankind spell-bound: the magnetic power of human personality.
One hears the clear, crisp clatter of the horse’s hoofs as they gallop through the epic. Docile as Rakush has become, his spirit is unbent; he is eager to fight his own battles and his master’s too. ”

“ Religion has been regarded too exclusively as a submission to Nature. At times it is a revolt against Nature, a repudiation of what our senses report to us, an assertion that things seen are illusions, and that things unseen are real. Religion is born of Doubt. The incredibility of the Known forced man to seek refuge in the Unknown. From that far region he brought back solutions good or bad, sublime or trivial, to the manifold problems which beset man’s soul. ”

“ He bids the young man fly in search of food, but while he is gone he reflects that it may be too late when he returns, and to save the mother from the dreadful crime of killing her children, and the little ones from the teeth of their famished mother, he flings himself down the precipice. Hearing the noise, and curious as to what it might mean, the tigress is turned from the thought of killing her young ones, and on looking round she sees the body of the saint and devours it. ”

“ Did not Darwin declare that he would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from various still extant races of mankind? Darwinism is really the theory of Pythagoras with the supernatural element left out. ”

“ Sotio took for granted that the youths who attended his classes came to him with minds unprepared to receive these doctrines, and he aimed more at making them accept the consequences of the theory than the theory itself. What if they believed none of it? What if they did not believe that souls passed through different bodies and that the thing we call death is a transmigration? That in the animal which crops the grass or which peoples the sea, a soul resides which once was human? That, like the heavenly bodies, every soul traverses its appointed circle? ”

“ In Egyptian (as in Assyrian) cosmogony the visible universe is the direct creation of God. “The god who is immanent in all things is the creator of every animal: under his name of Ram, of the sheep, Bull, of the cows: he loves the scorpion in his hole, he is the god of the crocodile who plunges in the water: he is the god of those who rest in their graves. Amon is an image, Atmee is an image, Ra is an image: HE alone maketh himself in millions of ways.” ”

“ But speculations more or less of the same sort were taken up by men of a very different stamp; it was to be foreseen that animals would have their portion of attention in the ponderings of the god-intoxicated musers who have been called the Sceptics of the Renaissance. For the proof that they did receive it we have only to turn to the pages of Giordano Bruno. “Every part of creation has its share in being and cognition.” “There is a difference, not in quality, but in quantity, between the soul of man, the animal and the plant.” ”

“ As the ass of Balaam recognised the angel, so do all animals—except man—at all times recognise their God. “But ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee.... Who knoweth not of all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.” ”

“ Somerville said: “I shall regret the sky, the sea, with all the changes of their beautiful colouring; the earth with its verdure and flowers: but far more shall I grieve to leave animals who have followed our steps affectionately for years, without knowing for certainty their ultimate fate, though I firmly believe that the living principle is never extinguished. Since the atoms of matter are indestructible, as far as we know, it is difficult to believe that the spark which gives to their union life, memory, affection, intelligence, and fidelity, is evanescent.” ”

“ Pythagoras and his fire-spent disciple belong to times which seem almost near if judged by Indian computations: yet they are nebulous figures; they seem to us, and perhaps they seemed to men who lived soon after them, more like mysterious, half Divine bearers of a word than men of flesh and blood. But Plato, who is real to us and who has influenced so profoundly modern thought, Plato took their theory and displayed it to the Western world as the most logical explanation of the mystery of being. ”

“ With good sense and in that spirit of compromise which is really the basis of morality, Plutarch argued that cruelty to animals does not lie in the use but in the abuse of them; it is not cruel to kill them if they are incompatible with our own existence; it is not cruel to tame and train to our service those made by nature gentle and loving towards man which become the companions of our toil according to their natural aptitude. ”

“ In dealing with animal psychology Plutarch makes a strong point of the inherent improbability that, while feeling and imagination are the common share of all animated beings, reason should be apportioned only to a single species. “How can you say such things? Is not every one convinced that no being can feel without also possessing understanding, that there is not a single animal which has not a sort of thought and reason just as he comes into the world with senses and instinct?” ”

“ King Sivi had a severe struggle with himself, but he conquered his weakness, and when he feels the scale sink under him he is filled with indescribable joy and heaven and earth shake, which always happens when a Buddha is coming into existence. A crowd of gods descended and rested on the air: the sight of Sivi’s endurance caused them to weep tears that fell like rain mingled with divine flowers, which the gods threw down on the voluntary victim. ”

“ He may win very great promotion on earth or even a place in the Jaina heaven, the abode of light, where happy beings live long and enjoy great power and energy, and never grow old. Such a state agrees with the logical evolution of a virtuous but still this-worldly man. Could he aspire sincerely to a more spiritual state, and can the soul outsoar its own aspirations? The Jaina heaven is not eternal, but does every one wish for eternity? ”

“ Chanet, a follower of Descartes, said that he would believe that beasts thought when a beast told him so. By what cries of pain, by what looks of love, have not beasts told men that they thought! Man himself does not think in words in moments of profound emotion, whether of grief or joy. He cries out or he acts. Thought in its absolutely elementary form is action. ”

“ He said again: “There is no Moslem who planteth a tree or soweth a field, and man, birds or beasts eat from them, but it is a charity for him.” Like all other religious teachers, he was made by legend the central figure of a Nature Peace. He had miraculous authority over beasts as well as over man, and beasts, more directly than man, knew him to be from God. Once he was standing in the midst of a crowd when a camel came and prostrated itself before him. His companions exclaimed, “O Apostle of God! Beasts and trees worship thee, then it is meet for us to worship thee.” ”

“ One of the beasts most esteemed by Moslems, one of those who, with Balaam’s ass, Jonah’s whale, Abraham’s ram, Solomon’s ant, and several other favourite animals, are known to have been admitted into the highest heaven, is the dog in the Moslem version of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” the legend of the seven young men who hid in a cave and slept safely through a long period of persecution. The dog has a Divine command to say to the young men, “I love those who are dear to God, and I will guard you.” ”

“ Why should the bower-bird and the lyre-bird construct a lovely pleasance where they may dance? Man perceived the beautiful in fire and wind, in the swift air, the circle of stars, the violent water, the lights of heaven: “being delighted with the beauty of these things, he took them to be gods”—as was said by the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon about two hundred years before Christ. He also perceived the beautiful in the lithe movements of the snake and in the tiger’s symmetry. ”

“ He made during his reign a proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and drew up conditions for an universal league in which the Wolf and the Lamb, the Panther and the Kid, the Tiger and the Stag, the Dog and the Hare, should live together in perfect peace and amity. The Hare said, ‘Oh, how I have longed to see this day, in which the weak shall take their place with impunity by the side of the strong.’”
The temper of a people towards animals can be judged from its sports. ”

“ Originally they were true citizen-priests, mixing with the people as being of them. There was no life better or holier than the common life of duty and work. Isolation of any kind was contrary to the central Zoroastrian view of man as a social being. Among the wicked souls in hell, each one thinks itself utterly alone: it has no sight or knowledge of the host around it. Nothing could illustrate more powerfully than this the saying of a great French writer: “Seul a un synonyme: mort!” Solitude is the death of the soul. ”