It seems as if Descartes with his dictum that animals are mere machines had bewitched the whole of European philosophy. So important a thinker as Wilhelm Wundt mars his ethic with the following sentences: “The only object for sympathy is man. . . . The animals are for us fellow-creatures, an expression by which language already hints at the fact that we acknowledge here a kind of co-ordination with ourselves only with reference to the ultimate ground of everything that happens, viz., creation. Towards animals also, then, there can arise within us stirrings which are to a certain extent related to sympathy, but as to true sympathy with them there is always wanting the fundamental condition of the inner unity of our will with theirs.” To crown this wisdom he ends with the assertion that of rejoicing with animals there can at any rate be no question, as if he had never seen a thirsty ox drink. Kant emphasises especially that ethics have to do only with duties of man towards men. The “human” treatment of animals he thinks himself obliged to justify by putting it forward as a practising of sensibility which helps to improve our sympathetic relations with other human beings. Bentham, too, defends kindness to animals chiefly as a means of preventing the growth of heartless relations with other men, even though he here and there recognises it as something obviously right. Darwin in his _Descent of Man_ notices that the feeling of sympathy which is dominant in the social impulse, becomes at last so strong that it comes to include all men, and indeed even animals. But he does not pursue the problem and the [pg 234] significance of this fact any further, and contents himself with establishing the ethics of the human herd. Thus it ranks with European thought as a dogma that ethics have to do properly only with a man’s relation to his fellows and to society. The motives which emanate from Schopenhauer, Stern, and others, for throwing down the antiquated line of circumvallation, are not understood. This backward attitude is the more unintelligible seeing that both Indian thought and Chinese, even when they have only scarcely begun to develop, make ethics consist in a kindly relation to all creatures. Moreover, they have come to this view quite independently of each other. The subtle and far-reaching commands concerning regard for animals in the popular Chinese ethics of the book _Kan Yin Pien_ (_Concerning Rewards and Punishments_) cannot be referred back, as is commonly supposed, to Buddhist influences._(_105_)_ They have no connexion with metaphysical discussions about the mutual relationship of all beings, such as became effective as the ethical horizon widened in Indian thought, but originate in a living, ethical feeling which dares to draw the consequences which seem to it to be natural.