“It would be too long to enumerate here all the causes which may have produced so great an aberration. This will be the matter of another Discourse. I shall content myself for the moment with saying some words upon that which perpetuates it. It is essentially that lightness of mind, or, rather, that sort of stupidity, which makes all reflection upon anything which is opposed to their habits painful to the generality of mankind. They would turn their head aside with horror if they saw what a single one of their repasts costs Nature. They eat animals as some amongst them launch a bomb into the midst of a besieged town, without thinking of the evils which it must bring to a crowd of individuals, strangers to war--women, children, and old men--evils the near spectacle of which they could not support, in spite of the hardness of their hearts.... To-day, when everything is calculated with so much precision [he remarks with bitterness], there will not be wanting persons with sufficient assurance to attempt to prove that there is more of advantage for the domesticated animals to be born and live on condition of having their throats cut, than if they had remained in ‘nothingness,’ or in the natural state. As for the word ‘nothingness,’ I confess that I do not understand it, but I understand the other very well; and I have never conceived how man could have had the barbarity to accumulate all the calamities of the earth upon a single individual; that is to say, to slaughter it in return for having caused its degeneracy. But if he thinks himself to escape from the influence of an action so dastardly and so infamous, he would be in a very great error....