1885. 1 Physiology and its Opponents. 655 
But to return to Mr. Robertson. He continues : — “ Be- 
tween such indulgences in reckless slander and the blunders 
into which they fall through extreme ignorance the defenders 
of the ‘rights’ of animals make a rather sorry exhibition. 
Miss Cobbe has been so egregiously absurd as to call a 
‘reflex aCtion ’ a ‘ spasm of agony,’ not knowing [or knowing 
but not caring to admit ?] that the sine qua non of the thing 
is the absence of sensation in the subject ; and the Scottish 
Anti-ViviseCtion Society, a year or two ago, made a vehe- 
ment attack on a Professor for the cruelty of certain expe- 
riments in which he had pointed out there was no pain at 
all. Anyone with the merest smattering of physiological 
knowledge would have known as much from the reports ; 
but the superfluously sympathetic zoophiles conceived a 
decapitated frog and an amputated frog’s leg as writhing 
in agony under the hands of the demonstrator. We see, 
then, that an excessive sympathy with animals is not at all 
necessarily an elevating influence, but may, like every other 
unregulated emotion, lead to all sorts of harmful conduct. 
What does the extreme attachment to animals, seen in so 
many anti-viviseCtionists, really signify ? Obviously a faculty 
for taking an extremely idealised, and therefore false, view 
of an animal’s nature ; for misconceiving, consequently, the 
relations of things in general ; and for keeping the reasoning 
faculties in disastrous subjection to the passions. People 
admit in theory that any personal quality may become a vice 
merely by running to excess, but they singularly fail to apply 
the principle in detail. The zoophile flatters himself that 
his love of animals is a shining virtue, when in point of faCt 
it is an extravagance which warps his moral nature, and 
makes him unscrupulous towards men in proportion as he is 
tender towards beasts. Take, further, the conception of the 
nature of cats and dogs exhibited in Miss Cobbe’s pamphlet. 
There is no word there of the other side of the animal 
nature ; and no recognition of the faCt that the fidelity of 
cats and dogs is practically an unmoralised affeCtion, being 
simply given to those near them without any save interested 
discrimination. [The Bill Sykes of fiction and the Peace 
of real life, along with unnumbered brigands, murderers, 
tyrants, and fools, are as dear to dogs as if they were saints 
or sages.] That is the typical attitude of the adorers of 
pets. . . . The pet-lover is not disturbed by his cat’s cruelty 
to mice or his dog’s ferocity towards other animals : these 
manifestations of character are serenely set down to irre- 
sponsible instinCt ; whilst the show of affeCtion, which is 
equally a matter of instinCt, is called a ‘noble moral quality.’ 
