“Sensation and perception are the principle of the kinship of all living beings. And [he reminds his opponents] Zeno and his followers [the Stoics] admit that alliance or _kinship_ (οἰκειώσις)[83] is the foundation of justice. Now, to the lower animals pertain perception and the sensations of pain and fear and injury. Is it not absurd, then, whereas we see that many of our own species live by brute sense alone, and exhibit neither reason nor intellect, and that very many of them surpass the most terrible wild beasts in cruelty, rage, rapine; that they murder even their own relatives; that they are tyrants and the tools of tyrants--seeing all this, is it not absurd, I say, to hold that we are obliged by nature to act leniently towards them, while no kindness is due from us to the Ox that ploughs, the Dog that is brought up with us, and those who nourish us with their milk and cover our bodies with their wool? Is not such a prejudice most irrational and absurd?” To the objection of Chrysippus (the second founder of the school of the Porch) that the gods made us for themselves and for the sake of each other, and that they made the non-human species for us--a convenient subterfuge by no means unknown to writers and talkers of our own times--Porphyry unanswerably replies:-- “Let him to whom this sophism may appear to have weight or probability, consider how he would meet the dictum of Karneades[84] that ‘everything in nature is benefited, when it obtains the ends to which it is adapted and for which it was generated.’ Now, _benefit_ is to be understood in a more general way as meaning what the Stoics call _useful_. ‘The hog, however,’ says Chrysippus, ‘was produced by nature for the purpose of being slaughtered and used for food, and when it undergoes this, it obtains the end for which it is adapted, and it is therefore benefited!’ But if God brought other animals into existence for the use of men, what use do we make of flies, beetles, lice, vipers, and scorpions? Some of these are hateful to the sight, defile the touch, are intolerable to the smell, while others are actually destructive to human beings who fall in their way.[85] With respect to the _cetacea_, in particular, which Homer tells us live by myriads in the seas, does not the Demiurgus[86] teach us that they have come into being for the good of things in general? And unless they affirm that all things were indeed made for us and on our sole account, how can they escape the imputation of wrong-doing in treating injuriously beings that came into existence according to the _general arrangement_ of Nature?