_ of instinct be of some value among civilized beings? Is not
man, even now, in spite of his abused and corrupted senses, when he sees
luscious fruits hanging within his reach, tempted to pluck them, and
does he not eat them with relish? But when he sees the grazing ox, or
the wallowing hog, do similar gustatory desires affect him? Or when he
sees these animals lying dead, or when skinned and cut up in small
pieces, does this same natural instinct stimulate him to steal and eat
this food as it stimulates a boy to steal apples and nuts from an
orchard and eat them surreptitiously beneath the hedge or behind the
haystack?

Very different is it with true carnivora. The gorge of a cat, for
instance, will rise at the smell of a mouse, or a piece of raw flesh,
but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man could take delight in pouncing
upon a bird, tear its still living body apart with his teeth, sucking
the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with
carnivorous instinct, but the very _thought_ of doing such a thing makes
him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his
'mouth water,' and even in the absence of hunger he will eat fruit to
gratify taste. A table spread with fruits and nuts and decorated with
flowers is artistic; the same table laden with decaying flesh and blood,
and maybe entrails, is not only inartistic--it is disgusting.

Those who believe in an all-wise Creator can hardly suppose He would
have so made our body as to make it necessary daily to perform acts of
violence that are an outrage to our sympathies, repulsive to our finer
feelings, and brutalising and degrading in every detail. To possess fine
feelings without the means to satisfy them is as bad as to possess
hunger without a stomach. If it be necessary and a part of the Divine
Wisdom that we should degrade ourselves to the level of beasts of prey,
then the humanitarian sentiment and the aesthetic instinct are wrong and
should be displaced by callousness, and the endeavour to cultivate a
feeling of enjoyment in that which to all the organs of sense in a
person of intelligence and religious feeling is ugly and repulsive. But
no normally-minded person can think that this is so. It would be
contrary to all the ethical and aesthetic teachings of every religion,
and antagonistic to the feelings of all who have evolved to the
possession of a conscience and the power to distinguish the beautiful
from the base.

When one a