phe, takes none of its horror from
the mode of death. To be dismembered alive is certainly not an agreeable
experience, and I suggest that you should observe how, for instance, a
water-adder swallows a frog; how the poor creature, seized by the hind
legs, gradually disappears down its throat, while its eyes project staring
out of their sockets; how it does not cease struggling desperately even as
it reaches the stomach.

"Now I, who am but a poor child of man, full of evil inclinations
according to Biblical lore, liberated the poor frog on my ground. But
'merciful nature' daily brings millions and millions of innocent creatures
to a like cruel and miserable end.

"I intentionally leave out of consideration here the unspeakable
sufferings of mankind. Believers in the Bible find it so convenient to
argue about original sin. Where is the original sin of the tormented
animal kingdom?

"Of course man in his unutterable pride looks with deep disdain on all
living creatures that are not human. As if he were not bone of their bone,
as if suffering did not form a common bond with all living creatures! (_I
have never done that, but I think that it is difficult to establish a
thermometer of suffering._)

"Do you not bethink you, honoured student of Sanskrit, of the religion of
the Brahmins? In sparing all animals, the Hindus have shown only the
broadest consistency.

"There will come a time when there will be only one religion, without
dogma: the religion of compassion. (_Buddhism is founded on Karunya,
compassion._) Christianity, lofty as is its ethical content, is not the
goal, but only a stage in our religious development.

"It is a misfortune that Nietzsche, the great keen thinker, should have
been misled into an opposite conclusion by the mental weakness, the
paralytic imbecility, which gradually enveloped his brain like a growth of
mould. And the foolish youths, who esteem the expressions of this
incipient insanity as the revelations of a vigorous genius, swear by his
later hallucinations about the Over-man and the blond beast.

"A specialist in mental disease can point out the traces of his malady
years before it openly broke out. And as if he had not written enough when
the world still considered him of sound mind, must men still try to glean
from the time when his brain was already visibly clouded?

"How few there are who can pick out of the desolate morass of growing
imbecility the scanty grains of higher intell