spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is
customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious,
nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable
of ethical judgment or independent action.

Just so do we find a crowd of petty vivisectionists daily committing
atrocities and stupidities, because it is the custom to do so.
Vivisection is customary as part of the routine of preparing lectures in
medical schools. For instance, there are two ways of making the action
of the heart visible to students. One, a barbarous, ignorant, and
thoughtless way, is to stick little flags into a rabbit's heart and
let the students see the flags jump. The other, an elegant, ingenious,
well-informed, and instructive way, is to put a sphygmograph on the
student's wrist and let him see a record of his heart's action traced
by a needle on a slip of smoked paper. But it has become the custom for
lecturers to teach from the rabbit; and the lecturers are not original
enough to get out of their groove. Then there are the demonstrations
which are made by cutting up frogs with scissors. The most humane man,
however repugnant the operation may be to him at first, cannot do it
at lecture after lecture for months without finally--and that very
soon--feeling no more for the frog than if he were cutting up pieces of
paper. Such clumsy and lazy ways of teaching are based on the cheapness
of frogs and rabbits. If machines were as cheap as frogs, engineers
would not only be taught the anatomy of machines and the functions of
their parts: they would also have machines misused and wrecked before
them so that they might learn as much as possible by using their eyes,
and as little as possible by using their brains and imaginations. Thus
we have, as part of the routine of teaching, a routine of vivisection
which soon produces complete indifference to it on the part even of
those who are naturally humane. If they pass on from the routine of
lecture preparation, not into general practice, but into research work,
they carry this acquired indifference with them into the laboratory,
where any atrocity is possible, because all atrocities satisfy
curiosity. The routine man is in the majority in his profession always:
consequently the moment his practice is tracked down to its source
in human passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from
himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of the
public, whi