Some popular fallacies about vivisection / by Lewis Carroll.

  • Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898.
Date:
[1875 [i.e. between 1920 and 1929?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Some popular fallacies about vivisection / by Lewis Carroll. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    thousands, I believe, who would be ready to assure the vivisectors that, so far as their personal interests are concerned, they are ready to forego any prospect they may have of a diminution of pain, if it can only be secured by the infliction of so much pain on innocent creatures. But I have a more serious charge than that ot selfishness to bring against the scientific men who make this assumption. They use it dishonestly, recognising it when it tells in their favour, and ignoring it when it tells against them. For does it not pre-suppose the axiom that human and animal suffering differ in kind ? A strange assertion this, from the lips of people who tell us that man is twin-brother to the monkey ! Let them be at least consistent, and when they have proved that the lessening of the human suffering is an end so great and glorious as to justify any means that will secure it, let them give the anthropomorphoid ape the benefit of the argu¬ ment. Further than that I will not ask them to go, but will resign them in confidence to the guidance of an exorable logic. Had they only the candour and courage to do it, I believe that they would choose the other horn of the dilemma, and would reply, Yes, man is in the same category as the brute ; and just as we care not (you see it, so we cannot deny it) how much pain we inflict on the one, so we care not, unless when deterred by legal penalties, how much we inflict on the other. The lust for scientific knowledge is our real guiding principle. The lessening of human suffering is a mere dummy set up to amuse sentimental dreamers.