CHAPTER ni. 



MORAL MERIT AND DEMERIT. 



THERE are many worthy people who, while they are compelled, 

 by the evidence of facts, to admit that certain animals 

 perform actions that from man's that is, their own point of 

 view must be regarded as beneficent, deny that such actions 

 in other animals are motived by the same moral or mental 

 influences that operate in man. While making no objection 

 to attributing to the lower animals the capacity, for instance, 

 for any kind or degree of self-sacrifice, they refuse to associate 

 therewith any sort of moral merit ; and, as a corollary, they 

 do not recognise demerit in actions of an opposite kind. They 

 resolutely oppose, in a great variety of ways, all supposition of 

 moral merit in the actions of the lower animals just because 

 they are lower animals, and on no other ground apparently. 

 Thus 



1. They deny that, in actions involving self-sacrifice, the 

 animals that sacrifice themselves have any true consciousness 

 or perception of the nature of their acts ; that such actions 

 are voluntary and deliberate ; or that they are the result of 

 anything like human motive. 



2. By regarding the lower animals as mere automata, 

 they get rid of all such difficulties, referring self-sacrifice and 

 other beneficent actions to ' instinct.' 



3. They attempt all manner of restricted definitions of such 

 terms as morality, religion, motive, and so forth, so as, if 

 possible, to exclude all other animals from participation in 

 attributes which they fondly regard as peculiar to man. 



But such objectors to granting to other animals credit or 

 merit for actions that in man would meet with the highest 



