On the other side, the humanitarian contention is quite clear--that there is no difference _in kind_ between man and the other animals, nor any warrant in science or ethics for drawing between them, as between “persons” and “things,” an absolute line of demarcation. Compelled to admit that the difference is only one of degree, Mr. Ritchie sought to evade the significance of this fact by arguing that it does not follow that, if men have rights, animals also have rights “in the same sense of the term.” I maintain that it _does_ so follow. If by the recognition of rights we mean that man, as a sentient and intelligent being, should be exempt from all avoidable suffering, it follows that other beings who are also sentient and intelligent, though in a lower degree, should have, in a lower degree, the same exemption. This principle, if pressed to its extreme logical conclusion, will of course lead, like all other principles, to what Mr. Ritchie called “difficult questions of casuistry,” and will open a door for small jokes about the personality of parasites and sponges. Then, again, it is too often overlooked that the rights claimed for animals, as for men, are not absolute but conditional (“this restricted freedom” is Herbert Spencer’s expression), and that a recognition of the rights of other beings is not incompatible with an equal assertion of one’s own. Self-defence is the first and most obvious right of everyone. If, for instance, we hold that a tiger has a right to be spared any unnecessary torture, are we compelled on that account to allow him to eat us if he comes out of his cage? And how would our shooting the tiger, under those untoward circumstances, prove that the tiger is not a “person,” inasmuch as murderers and _human_ tigers, are similarly treated under similar conditions? This “tiger” argument, to which Professor Ritchie was much addicted, is really very small game. 1895. II THE NEO-CARTESIANS[51] Attempts are still made, from time to time, to revive the old Cartesian doctrine that animals do not feel pain. Thus Mr. E. Kay Robinson, in a book entitled “The Religion of Nature” (1906) has sought to bring peace and comfort to the minds of his readers, and to reconcile the seeming cruelties of Nature with the existence of a merciful God, by proving that the non-human races, unlike mankind, have no consciousness of suffering, even when they exhibit all the symptoms of pain and show a dread of its recurrence. This is nothing but the ancient doctrine of Descartes in a new garb, and is itself the outcome of the old anthropocentric view of the world.