s 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, s