funny to be
taken seriously, and is not cruel enough to overawe the mob, but simply
that it is impossible because the human experimenter cannot get at the
mouse's mind. And that is what is wrong with all the barren cruelties of
the laboratories. Darwin's followers did not think of this. Their only
idea of investigation was to imitate 'Nature' by perpetrating violent
and senseless cruelties, and watch the effect of them with a paralyzing
fatalism which forbade the smallest effort to use their minds instead of
their knives and eyes, and established an abominable tradition that the
man who hesitates to be as cruel as Circumstantial Selection itself is a
traitor to science. For Weismann's experiment upon the mice was a mere
joke compared to the atrocities committed by other Darwinians in their
attempts to prove that mutilations could not be transmitted. No doubt
the worst of these experiments were not really experiments at all, but
cruelties committed by cruel men who were attracted to the laboratory by
the fact that it was a secret refuge left by law and public superstition
for the amateur of passionate torture. But there is no reason to suspect
Weismann of Sadism. Cutting off the tails of several generations of mice
is not voluptuous enough to tempt a scientific Nero. It was a mere piece
of one-eyedness; and it was Darwin who put out Weismann's humane and
sensible eye. He blinded many another eye and paralyzed many another
will also. Ever since he set up Circumstantial Selection as the creator
and ruler of the universe, the scientific world has been the very
citadel of stupidity and cruelty. Fearful as the tribal god of the
Hebrews was, nobody ever shuddered as they passed even his meanest and
narrowest Little Bethel or his proudest war-consecrating cathedral as we
shudder now when we pass a physiological laboratory. If we dreaded and
mistrusted the priest, we could at least keep him out of the house; but
what of the modern Darwinist surgeon whom we dread and mistrust ten
times more, but into whose hands we must all give ourselves from time
to time? Miserably as religion had been debased, it did at least still
proclaim that our relation to one another was that of a fellowship
in which we were all equal and members one of another before the
judgment-seat of our common father. Darwinism proclaimed that our true
relation is that of competitors and combatants in a struggle for mere
survival, and that every act of pity or loyalt