Tired of reading? Add this page to your Bookmarks or Favorites and finish it later.
|
|
"And yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought
as an end, and systematically, by modern investigators until I took it up!
Some of such things have been hit upon in the last resort of surgery;
most of the kindred evidence that will recur to your mind has been
demonstrated as it were by accident,--by tyrants, by criminals,
by the breeders of horses and dogs, by all kinds of untrained
clumsy-handed men working for their own immediate ends.
I was the first man to take up this question armed with antiseptic surgery,
and with a really scientific knowledge of the laws of growth.
Yet one would imagine it must have been practised in secret before.
Such creatures as the Siamese Twins--And in the vaults of
the Inquisition. No doubt their chief aim was artistic torture,
but some at least of the inquisitors must have had a touch of
scientific curiosity."
"But," said I, "these things--these animals talk!"
He said that was so, and proceeded to point out that the possibility
of vivisection does not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis.
A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate
than the bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find
the promise of a possibility of superseding old inherent instincts by
new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas.
Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he said,
is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct;
pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed
sexuality into religious emotion. And the great difference
between man and monkey is in the larynx, he continued,--
in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which
thought could be sustained. In this I failed to agree with him,
but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my objection.
He repeated that the thing was so, and continued his account of
his work.
|