The shadow of no such doubt falls on the pages of the neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry. To them the destiny of animals was not an academic problem but an obsession. The questions which Heine’s young man asked of the waves: “What signifies man? Whence does he come? Whither does he go?” were asked by them with passionate earnestness in their application to all sentient things. Plotinus reasoned, with great force, that intelligent beast-souls must be like the soul of man since in itself the essence of the soul could not be different. Porphyry (born at Tyre, A.D. 233), accepting this postulate that animals possess an intelligent soul like ours, went on to declare that it was therefore unlawful to kill or feed on them under any circumstances. If justice is due to rational beings, how is it possible to evade the conclusion that we are also bound to act justly towards the races below us? He who loves all animated nature will not single out one tribe of innocent beings for hatred; if he loves the whole he will love every part, and, above all, that part which is most closely allied to ourselves. Porphyry was quite ready to admit that animals in their own way made use of words, and he mentions Melampus and Apollonius as among the philosophers who understood their language. He quoted with approval the laws supposed to have been framed by Triptolemus in the reign of Pandion, fifth king of Athens: “Honour your parents; make oblations of your fruits to the gods; hurt not any living creature.” Neoplatonism penetrated into the early Church, but divested of its views on animal destiny; even the Catholic neoplatonist Boëthius, though he was sensitively fond of animals (witness his lines about caged birds), yet took the extreme view of the hard-and-fast line of separation, as may be seen by his poem on the “downward head,” which he interpreted to indicate the earth-bound nature of all flesh save man. Birds, by the by, and even fishes, not to speak of camel-leopards, can hardly be said to have a “downward head.” Meanwhile, the other manner of feeling, if not of thinking, reasserted its power as it always will, for it belongs to the primal things. Excluded from the broad road, it came in by the narrow way—the way that leads to heaven. In the wake of the Christian Guru came a whole troop of charming beasts, little less saintly and miraculous than their holy protectors, and thus preachers of the religion of love were spared the reproach of showing an all-unloving face towards creatures that could return love for love as well as most and better than many of the human kind. The saint saved the situation, and the Church wisely left him alone to discourse to his brother fishes or his sister turtle-doves, without inquiring about the strict orthodoxy of the proceeding.