I believe the right of practising vivisection should not be accorded to every citizen, to every medical student; it should not be permissible for any chance person to take a dog, to fasten him down on the operating table, and to experiment on the brain, the glands, the muscles of that unfortunate animal, for that chance person is, in all probability, a clumsy and ignorant man. Vivisection may not be undertaken in a light-hearted fashion. After all, science would lose nothing if such an experiment were not made, and I see no advantage in encouraging attempts of this sort which are condemned beforehand to be fruitless. But in a laboratory of physiology, under the direction of the professor and his assistants, under their moral responsibility, vivisection should not be prohibited; the number of vivisections should not be limited, and no restrictions ought to be imposed. As I have no intention of formulating or drawing up regulations or enacting laws, I shall not indicate the penalties to which those who violate the law should be liable. I shall content myself with enunciating this double principle: entire liberty in vivisection for professors of physiology and their assistants; prohibition of vivisection for all others. CHAPTER VIII VIVISECTION AND THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE Let us now leave the opinions of anti-vivisectionists, and carry the problem on to higher ground. Let us see what are the rights of man in Nature, and what is the purpose of human life. Amidst all the unsettled and contradictory theories accumulated by philosophers, thinkers and founders of religion, there remains scarcely any fixed and immutable theory save that of one dominating principle: The respect and love of our brothers in humanity. All else is contestable and contested. Though we are unable to demonstrate it formally, there is one universal moral law (the great Categorical Imperative of Kant) which commands us to be just and beneficent to our fellow-creatures. All the most subtle sophisms will never be able to persuade me that I ought not, above all things, to feel solicitude for the lives and happiness of men. I willingly admit that beside man there is the animal, _our inferior brother_ as it has been ingeniously called, so that we have also our duties towards these inferior brothers. But _this must never be to the detriment of our real brothers_. It seems to me insane to consider the life of a cat of more account than that of a man; the pain of a dog than that of a child. All the more so because living matter, if I may use that expression, possesses varying degrees of perfection; from the sea-weed up to man there are successive stages of living forms which constitute an uninterrupted chain ending in its final phase, which is man.