We have now, I think, seen good reason to suspect that the principle of selfishness lies at the root of this accursed practice. That the same principle is probably the cause of the indifference with which its growth among us is regarded, is not perhaps so obvious. Yet I believe this indifference to based on a tacit assumption, which I propose to notice as the last of this long catalogue of fallacies—
13. That the practice of vivisection will never be extended so as to include human subjects.
That is, in other words, that while science arrogates to herself the right of torturing a her pleasure the whole sentient creation up to man himself, some inscrutable boundary-line is there drawn, over which she will never venture to pass. “Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.”
Not improbably, when that stately Levite of old was pacing with dainty step the road that led from Jerusalem to Jericho, “bemused with thinking of tithe-concerns,” and doing his best to look unconscious of the prostrate form on the other side of the way, if it could have been whispered in his ear, “Your turn comes next to fall among the thieves !” some sudden thrill of pity might have been aroused in him : he might even, at the risk of soiling those rich robes, have joined the Samaritan in his humane task of tending the wounded man. And surely the easy-going Levites of our own time would take an altogether new interest in this matter, could they only realise the possible advent of a day when anatomy shall claim, as legitimate subjects for experiment, first, our condemned criminals—next, perhaps, the inmates of our refuges for incurables—then the hopeless lunatic, the pauper hospital-patient, and generally “him that hath no helper,”—a day when successive generations of students, trained from their earliest years to the repression of all human sympathies, shall have developed a new and more hideous Frankenstein—a soulless being to whom science shall be all in all. Homo sum : quidvis humanum a me alienum puto.
The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) (1832-1898), English author, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection” serialised on The Grumpy Vegan and available in full at the Animal Rights Library.
