ETHICS BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST. 637 



count waste its sweetness, but fully accomplishes its mission, pro- 

 vided there is a bee or a bug abroad to be drawn to it. That the 

 fragrance and variegated petals are alluring to a vagrant insect is 

 a condition of far more importance in determining the fate of the 

 plant than that they should be charming to man. 



Plants, on the other hand, which depend upon the force of the 

 wind for fructification, are not distinguished for beauty of color 

 or sweetness of odor, since these qualities, however agreeable to 

 man, would be wasted on the wind. This is an illustration of the 

 prudent economy of Nature, which never indulges in superfluities 

 or overburdens her products with useless attributes ; but the test 

 of utility which " great creating Nature " sets up in such cases is 

 little flattering to man, and has no reference to his tastes and sus- 

 ceptibilities, but is determined solely by the serviceableness of 

 certain qualities of the plant itself in the struggle for existence. 



According to Schopenhauer, anthropocentric -egoism is a fun- 

 damental and fatal defect in the psychological and ethical teach- 

 ings of both Judaism and Christianity, and has been the source 

 of untold misery to myriads of sentient and highly sensitive 

 organisms. "These religions," he says, "have unnaturally sev- 

 ered man from the animal world, to which he essentially belongs, 

 and placed him on a pinnacle apart, treating all lower creatures 

 as mere things; whereas Brahmanism and Buddhism insist not 

 only upon his kinship with all forms of animal life, but also upon 

 his vital connection with all animated Nature, binding him up 

 into intimate relationship with them by metempsychosis." 



In the Hebrew cosmogony there is no continuity in the process 

 of creation, whereby the genesis of man is in any wise connected 

 with the genesis of the lower animals. After the Lord God, by 

 his fiat, had produced beasts, birds, fishes, and creeping things, he 

 ignored all this mass of protoplastic and organic material, and 

 took an entirely new departure in the production of man, whom 

 he formed out of the dust of the ground. Science shows him to 

 have been originally a little higher than the ape, out of which he 

 was gradually and painfully evolved ; Scripture takes him out of 

 his environment, severs him from his antecedents, and makes him 

 a little lower than the angels. Upon the being thus arbitrarily 

 created absolute dominion is conferred over every beast of the 

 earth and every fowl of the air, which are to be to him " for 

 meat." They are given over to his supreme and irresponsible 

 control, without the slightest injunction of kindness or the 

 faintest suggestion of any duties or obligations toward them. 



Again, when the earth is to be renewed and replenished after 

 the deluge, the same principles are reiterated and the same line of 

 demarcation is drawn and even deepened. God blesses Noah and 

 his sons, bids them " be fruitful and multiply," and then adds, as 



