University of Virginia Library

Eighteenth Century and Later. The eighteenth cen-
tury was on the whole anti-Cartesian. Hester Hastings
(1936) has shown how the scientific approach to animal
life took precedence over the philosophic; and while
men did not weary of the theoretical refinements of
their predecessors' doctrines, theriophily became more
of a feeling for the sufferings of animals than an
appraisal of human life. The feeling as it grew in
intensity started the Humane Societies. Because of the
efforts of Richard Martin, an Irish M.P., the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was
founded in 1824. In the United States the American
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
(A. S. P. C. A.) was founded in 1866 by Henry Bergh.
It came to be believed that whether beasts had a
material or immaterial soul, whether they could reason
or not, they were capable of suffering, and that sufficed
to create a bond between them and us. As for the
question of their rationality, instinct and its supposed
wonders supplanted it; a scientific zoology took the
place of natural history, the questions that had stirred
the theriophilists were settled in the laboratory and
field rather than in the study.

At the same time new philosophic tenets developed
in the eighteenth century brought the animals and man
closer together. The gap between animal and human
psychology created by Cartesianism was bridged by
the epistemology of John Locke as modified by E. B.
de Condillac in France. Condillac's Essai sur l'origine
des connaissances humaines (1746) puts the source of
all ideas in sensation. In his Traité des animaux (1755)
he argues that animals have the same sort of feelings
that men have, on the ground that they have sense
organs just like ours. They are not capable of the subtle
reasoning of men but as far as their needs demand
intelligence, they posses it. They are therefore not
superior to men, in the opinion of Condillac, for after
all we are not automata. Once it was granted that they
could have ideas and feelings of the same general type
as human ideas and feelings, the kinship of all animate
life was established. The eighteenth century saw the
quickened development of entomology and zoology;
and as men investigated the behavior of the beasts and
insects, they found grounds for greater admiration for
these creatures. This admiration has continued into our
own times and there are few men who are not
awestruck by such things as the migration of birds, the
dance of the bees, the provisions made by wasps of
food for their larvae which they will never see. A
philosopher like Henri Bergson, though hardly a
theriophilist, nevertheless utilized the work of the
zoologists to demonstrate his theories of intuition. The
work of J. H. Fabre in entomology supplemented that
of R. A. F. de Réaumur, just as the work of Konrad
Lorenz supplemented that of G. J. Romanes.

If one wishes then to depreciate intelligence, one
has as much material in the writings of the scientists
as our forefathers had in those of Aristotle, Aelian,
Pliny, and Plutarch. Moreover it is based on better
evidence. Inane as some of the traditional stories are,
they lie behind the long history of man's admiration
for the beasts, which in modern times has been ex-
pressed in stories of animal courage, fidelity, kindness.
An outstanding expression of modern theriophily is
contained in the famous lines of Walt Whitman from
Song of Myself:

The one outstanding item that is missing from
Whitman's lines is mention of the rationality of the
beasts. But its absence would not have been lamentable
to a mystic like Whitman.