“The devout faith which we cherish at heart, and which we teach in these pages, is that man will peaceably subdue the whole earth, when he shall gradually perceive that every adopted being, accustomed to a domesticated life, or at least to that degree of friendship and companionship of which his nature is susceptible, will be a hundred times more useful to him than he can be with his throat cut (_qu’il ne pourrait l’être égorgé_). Man will not be truly man until he shall labour seriously for that which the Earth expects from him--the pacification and harmonious union (_ralliement_) of all living Nature. Hunt and make war upon the lion and the eagle if you will, but not upon the Weak and Innocent.” This Michelet never wearies of repeating, and he returns again and again to a truth which is scorned by the modern self-seeking and money-getting, as it was by the fighting, wholly barbarous, world:-- “Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness, this tenderness for animated Nature. The Persians, the Romans in Egypt, our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often outraged and stricken these innocent brothers of man--the objects of his ancient reverence. Cambyses slew the sacred Cow; a Roman the Ibis who destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the Cow? The fecundity of the country. And the Ibis? Its salubrity. Destroy these animals, and the country is no longer habitable. That which has saved India and Egypt through so many misfortunes and preserved their fertility, is neither the Nile nor the Ganges. It is respect for other life, the mildness and the [comparatively] gentle heart of man. “Profound in meaning was the speech of the Priest of Saïs to the Greek Herodotus--‘You shall be children always.’ “We shall always be so--we men of the West--subtle and graceful reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple and more exhaustive view, the _motive_ of things. To be a child, is to seize life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully conscious of _all its harmonious unity_. The child disports himself, shatters and destroys; he finds his happiness in _undoing_. And science, in its childhood, does the same. It cannot study unless it kills. The sole use which it makes of a living mind, is, in the first place, to dissect it. None carry into scientific pursuits that tender reverence for life which Nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries.”[258] Like Shelley, he firmly believed in the indefinite amelioration of our world by the ultimate triumph of principles of _humaneness_, so that the “sting of death” and of pain might almost, if not entirely, be removed:--