her. With pretentions much
less reasonable the anatomical novice tears out the living bowels of
an animal and styles himself physician, prepares himself by familiar
cruelty for that profession which he is to exercise upon the tender
and the helpless, upon feeble bodies and broken minds, and by which
he has opportunities to extend his arts and torture, and continue
those experiments upon infancy and age, which he has hitherto tried
upon cats and dogs. What is alleged in defence of these hateful
practices everyone knows, but the truth is that by knives, fire, and
poisons, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained.
I know not that by living dissections any discovery has been made by
which a single malady is more easily cured. And if the knowledge of
physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear
who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his own
humanity. It is time that a universal resentment should arise
against those horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart and
make the physician more dreadful than the gout or the stone.

CHAPTER VIII: THOMAS CARLYLE
VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

The world of letters and of ethics has hardly yet settled whether much of
the teaching of the Sage of Chelsea should be the subject of praise or
blame.

In the advocacy of fine principles of conduct set forth for us in
language of surpassing eloquence and earnest conviction in many a page of
"Sartor Resartus," and scattered through innumerable pamphlets, Carlyle
commands the fervent adhesion of the honest, the brave, and the good;
while in other parts of his writings his infatuated admiration of force,
however clothed with brutality, and of strength, however marred with
mendacity, are calculated as deeply to alienate the urbane man of the
world as the austere Christian.

And this confusion in the estimate of Carlyle and of his teaching suffers
an aggravation from the manifest malice of the biography of him
perpetrated by his friend James Anthony Froude. A man who is entrusted
with the task of writing the life of a great man who was also his friend
need not adopt the language of continuous panegyric, but to throw a
brilliant illumination upon the man's smaller domestic rugosities which
even the weakest charity would conceal and the feeblest generosity would
forget is a singularly