Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (232 page)

During 1875 Mr.
Dodgson wrote an article on "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection," which was refused by the
Pall Mall Gazette
, the editor saying that he had never heard of most of them; on which Mr.
Dodgson plaintively notes in his Diary that seven out of the thirteen fallacies dealt with in his essay had appeared in the columns of the
Pall Mall Gazette
.
Ultimately it was accepted by the editor of
The Fortnightly Review
.
Mr.
Dodgson had a peculiar horror of vivisection.
I was once walking in Oxford with him when a certain well-known professor passed us.
"I am afraid that man vivisects," he said, in his gravest tone.
Every year he used to get a friend to recommend him a list of suitable charities to which he should subscribe.
Once the name of some Lost Dogs' Home appeared in this list.
Before Mr.
Dodgson sent his guinea he wrote to the secretary to ask whether the manager of the Home was in the habit of sending dogs that had to be killed to physiological laboratories for vivisection.
The answer was in the negative, so the institution got the cheque.
He did not, however, advocate the total abolition of vivisection—what reasonable man could?—but he would have liked to see it much more carefully restricted by law.
An earlier letter of his to the
Pall Mall Gazette
on the same subject is sufficiently characteristic to deserve a place here.
Be it noted that he signed it "Lewis Carroll," in order that whatever influence or power his writings had gained him might tell in the controversy.

VIVISECTION AS A SIGN OF THE TIMES.

To the Editor of the "Pall Mall Gazette."

Sir,—The letter which appeared in last week's
Spectator
, and which must have saddened the heart of every one who read it, seems to suggest a question which has not yet been asked or answered with sufficient clearness, and that is, How far may vivisection be regarded as a sign of the times, and a fair specimen of that higher civilisation which a purely secular State education is to give us?
In that much-vaunted panacea for all human ills we are promised not only increase of knowledge, but also a higher moral character; any momentary doubt on this point which we may feel is set at rest at once by quoting the great crucial instance of Germany.
The syllogism, if it deserves the name, is usually stated thus: Germany has a higher scientific education than England; Germany has a lower average of crime than England;
ergo
, a scientific education tends to improve moral conduct.
Some old-fashioned logician might perhaps whisper to himself, "Praemissis particularibus nihil probatur," but such a remark, now that Aldrich is out of date, would only excite a pitying smile.
May we, then, regard the practice of vivisection as a legitimate fruit, or as an abnormal development, of this higher moral character?
Is the anatomist, who can contemplate unmoved the agonies he is inflicting for no higher purpose than to gratify a scientific curiosity, or to illustrate some well-established truth, a being higher or lower, in the scale of humanity, than the ignorant boor whose very soul would sicken at the horrid sight?
For if ever there was an argument in favour of purely scientific education more cogent than another, it is surely this (a few years back it might have been put into the mouth of any advocate of science; now it reads like the merest mockery): "What can teach the noble quality of mercy, of sensitiveness to all forms of suffering, so powerfully as the knowledge of what suffering really is?
Can the man who has once realised by minute study what the nerves are, what the brain is, and what waves of agony the one can convey to the other, go forth and wantonly inflict pain on any sentient being?"
A little while ago we should have confidently replied, "He cannot do it"; in the light of modern revelations we must sorrowfully confess "He can."
And let it never be said that this is done with serious forethought of the balance of pain and gain; that the operator has pleaded with himself, "Pain is indeed an evil, but so much suffering may fitly be endured to purchase so much knowledge."
When I hear of one of these ardent searchers after truth giving, not a helpless dumb animal, to whom he says in effect, "
You
shall suffer that
I
may know," but his own person to the probe and to the scalpel, I will believe in him as recognising a principle of justice, and I will honour him as acting up to his principles.
"But the thing cannot be!"
cries some amiable reader, fresh from an interview with that most charming of men, a London physician.
"What!
Is it possible that one so gentle in manner, so full of noble sentiments, can be hardhearted?
The very idea is an outrage to common sense!"
And thus we are duped every day of our lives.
Is it possible that that bank director, with his broad honest face, can be meditating a fraud?
That the chairman of that meeting of shareholders, whose every tone has the ring of truth in it, can hold in his hand a "cooked" schedule of accounts?
That my wine merchant, so outspoken, so confiding, can be supplying me with an adulterated article?
That the schoolmaster, to whom I have entrusted my little boy, can starve or neglect him?
How well I remember his words to the dear child when last we parted.
"You are leaving your friends," he said, "but you will have a father in me, my dear, and a mother in Mrs.
Squeers!"
For all such rose-coloured dreams of the necessary immunity from human vices of educated men the facts in last week's
Spectator
have a terrible significance.
"Trust no man further than you can see him," they seem to say.
"Qui vult decipi, decipiatur."

Allow me to quote from a modern writer a few sentences bearing on this subject:—

"We are at present, legislature and nation together, eagerly pushing forward schemes which proceed on the postulate that conduct is determined, not by feelings, but by cognitions.
For what else is the assumption underlying this anxious urging-on of organisations for teaching?
What is the root-notion common to Secularists and Denominationalists but the notion that spread of knowledge is the one thing needful for bettering behaviour?
Having both swallowed certain statistical fallacies, there has grown up in them the belief that State education will check ill-doing....
This belief in the moralising effects of intellectual culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd
a priori
....
This faith in lesson-books and readings is one of the superstitions of the age....
Not by precept, though heard daily; not by example, unless it is followed; but only by action, often caused by the related feeling, can a moral habit be formed.
And yet this truth, which mental science clearly teaches, and which is in harmony with familiar sayings, is a truth wholly ignored in current educational fanaticisms."

There need no praises of mine to commend to the consideration of all thoughtful readers these words of Herbert Spencer.
They are to be found in "The Study of Sociology" (pp.
36l—367).

Let us, however, do justice to science.
It is not so wholly wanting as Mr.
Herbert Spencer would have us believe in principles of action—principles by which we may regulate our conduct in life.
I myself once heard an accomplished man of science declare that his labours had taught him one special personal lesson which, above all others, he had laid to heart.
A minute study of the nervous system, and of the various forms of pain produced by wounds had inspired in him one profound resolution; and that was—what think you?—never, under any circumstances, to adventure his own person into the field of battle!
I have somewhere read in a book—a rather antiquated book, I fear, and one much discredited by modern lights—the words, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."
Truly we read these words with a new meaning in the present day!
"Groan and travail" it undoubtedly does still (more than ever, so far as the brute creation is concerned); but to what end?
Some higher and more glorious state?
So one might have said a few years back.
Not so in these days.
The
telos teleion
of secular education, when divorced from religious or moral training, is—I say it deliberately—the purest and most unmitigated selfishness.
The world has seen and tired of the worship of Nature, of Reason, of Humanity; for this nineteenth century has been reserved the development of the most refined religion of all—the worship of Self.
For that, indeed, is the upshot of it all.
The enslavement of his weaker brethren—"the labour of those who do not enjoy, for the enjoyment of those who do not labour"—the degradation of woman—the torture of the animal world—these are the steps of the ladder by which man is ascending to his higher civilisation.
Selfishness is the key-note of all purely secular education; and I take vivisection to be a glaring, a wholly unmistakable case in point.
And let it not be thought that this is an evil that we can hope to see produce the good for which we are asked to tolerate it, and then pass away.
It is one that tends continually to spread.
And if it be tolerated or even ignored now, the age of universal education, when the sciences, and anatomy among them, shall be the heritage of all, will be heralded by a cry of anguish from the brute creation that will ring through the length and breadth of the land!
This, then, is the glorious future to which the advocate of secular education may look forward: the dawn that gilds the horizon of his hopes!
An age when all forms of religious thought shall be things of the past; when chemistry and biology shall be the ABC of a State education enforced on all; when vivisection shall be practised in every college and school; and when the man of science, looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his, shall exult in the thought that he has made of this fair green earth, if not a heaven for man, at least a hell for animals.

I am, sir,

Your obedient servant,

Lewis Carroll.

February 10th
.

On March 29, 1876, "The Hunting of the Snark" was published.
Mr.
Dodgson gives some interesting particulars of its evolution.
The first idea for the poem was the line "For the Snark
was
a Boojum, you see," which came into his mind, apparently without any cause, while he was taking a country walk.
The first complete verse which he composed was the one which stands last in the poem:—

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,

He had softly and suddenly vanished away—

For the Snark
was
a Boojum, you see.