The moral aspects of vivisection / By Frances Power Cobbe.

  • Cobbe, Frances Power, 1822-1904.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The moral aspects of vivisection / By Frances Power Cobbe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    THE MORAL ASPECTS OF VIVISECTION. The notion of the extreme tenderness and sensibility of early youth, especially in the male human creature, is almost as purely conventional and remote from experience as the poetic fiction of an English spring, all sunshine and flowers. That type of cruelty which comes of ignorance and reckless- ness, both of their own suffering and that of others, and wherein Curiosity, not Malice, is the prevailing motive, is at its worst in adolescence ; and only as years go by, and obser- vations multiply, and the experience of pain ploughs up the heart, does sympathy grow by slow degrees, till at last, as Sir Arthur Helps has pointed out, it may be predicted with cer- tainty that a jury of old men will take the most merciful view of every case brought for their verdict. On the larger scale of nations and of humanity, the same process of slow initiation into the mysteries of suffering and of sympathy goes forward, and we may now behold society so far emerged from the age of barbarism that an English gentle- man would no more insert now-a-days in his account-book (like the pious and charitable Alleyne) an item for Whipping of ye Blind Beare, than the stream of traffic would proceed peacefully in 1875 under Temple Bar were John Mitchell's head to be exhibited on the cornice. The influences of civil- ization, of religion, of culture—in short, of all kinds, mental