The teaching of humane societies condemning all vivisection is due to the exaggeration of a good sentiment and to ignorance of first principles. For they suppose that sufferings inflicted on brute animals are a violation of their rights. Now we maintain that brute animals have no rights in the true sense of the word. To prove this thesis we must explain what a right is and how men get to have rights. A _right_ is a moral claim to a thing, which claim other persons are obliged to respect. Since every man has a destiny appointed for him by his Creator, and which he is to work out by his own acts, he must have the means given him to do so. For to assign a person a task and not to give him the means of accomplishing it would be absurd. Therefore the Creator wants him to have those means, and forbids every one to deprive him of those means. Here is the foundation of rights. Every man, in virtue of the Creator's will, has certain advantages or claims to advantages assigned him which no other man may infringe. Those advantages and claims constitute his rights, guaranteed him by the Creator; and all other men have the _duty_ imposed on them to respect those rights. Thus rights and duties are seen to be correlative and inseparable; the rights lodged in one man beget duties in other men. The same Creator that assigns rights to one man lays upon all others duties to respect those rights, that thus every free being may have the means of working out its Heaven-appointed destiny. Thus it is apparent that rights and duties suppose free beings, persons; now an irrational animal is not a person; it is not a free being, having a destiny to work out by its free acts; it is therefore incapable of having duties. Duties are matters of conscience; therefore they cannot belong to the brute animal; for it has no conscience. And, since rights are given to creatures because of the duties incumbent on them, brute animals are incapable of having rights. When a brute animal has served man's purpose, it has reached its destiny. III. But it is entirely different with man: there is what we may call an infinite distance between man and brute. Every man is created directly for the honor and service not of other men, but of God Himself: by serving God man must work out his own destiny--eternal happiness. In this respect all men are equal, having the same essence or nature and the same destiny. The poor child has as much right to attain eternal happiness as the rich child, the infant as much as the gray-bearded sire. Every one is only at the beginning of an endless existence, of which he is to determine the nature by his own free acts. In this infinite destiny lies the infinite superiority of man over the brute creation.