Page:Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.djvu/1217

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POPULAR FALLACIES ABOUT VIVISECTION
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spurred on by no other motive than a boundless philanthropy. As one who has himself devoted much time and labour to scientific investigations, I desire to offer the strongest possible protest against this falsely coloured picture. I believe that any branch of science, when taken up by one who has a natural turn for it, will soon become as fascinating as sport to the most ardent sportsman, or as any form of pleasure to the most refined sensualist. The claim that hard work, or the endurance of privation, proves the existence of an unselfish motive, is simply monstrous. Grant to me that the miser is proved unselfish when he stints himself of food and sleep to add one more piece of gold to his secret hoard, that the place-hunter is proved unselfish when he toils through long years to reach the goal of his ambition, and I will grant to you that the laborious pursuit of science is proof positive of an unselfish motive. Of course I do not assert, of even a single scientific student, that his real motive is merely that craving for more knowledge, whether useful or useless, which is as natural an appetite as the craving for novelty or any other form of excitement. I only say that the lower motive would account for the observed conduct quite as well as the higher.

Yet, after all, the whole argument, deduced from a comparison of vivisection with sport, rests on the following proposition, which I claim to class as a fallacy—

11. That toleration of one form of an evil necessitates the toleration of all others.

Grant this, and you simply paralyze all conceivable efforts at reformation. How can we talk of putting down cruelty to animals when drunkenness is rampant in the land? You would propose, then, to legislate in the interests of sobriety? Shame on you! Look at the unseaworthy ships in which our gallant sailors are risking their