on an absolute and radical difference between human beings and animals,
and who goes so far as to attack and calumniate honest zoologists that
keep aloof from all priestly guile, eye-service, and hypocrisy, and
dare to follow the leading of nature and of truth?
Those persons must indeed be totally blind, or else completely
chloroformed by the _foetor Judaicus_ (Jewish stench), who do not
discern that the truly essential and fundamental part in man and beast
is identically the same thing. That which distinguishes the one from
the other does not lie in the primary and original principle, in the
inner nature, in the kernel of the two phaenomena (this kernel being
in both alike the Will of the individual); it is found in what is
secondary, in the intellect, in the degree of perceptive capacity. It
is true that the latter is incomparably higher in man, by reason of
his added faculty of abstract knowledge, called Reason; nevertheless
this superiority is traceable solely to a greater cerebral development,
in other words, to the corporeal difference, which is quantitative,
not qualitative, of a single part, the brain. In all other respects
the similarity between men and animals, both psychical and bodily, is
sufficiently striking. So that we must remind our judaised friends
in the West, who despise animals, and idolise Reason, that if they
were suckled by their mothers, so also was the dog by his. Even Kant
fell into this common mistake of his age, and of his country, and I
have already administered the censure[7] which it is impossible to
withhold. The fact that Christian morality takes no thought for beasts
is a defect in the system which is better admitted than perpetuated.
One's astonishment is, however, all the greater, because, with this
exception, it shows the closest agreement with the Ethics of Brahmanism
and Buddhism, being only less strongly expressed, and not carried to
the last consequences imposed by logic. On the whole, there seems
little room for doubting that, in common with the idea of a god become
man, or Avatar,[8] it has an Asiatic origin, and probably came to
Judaea by way of Egypt; so that Christianity would be a secondary
reflection of the primordial light that shone in India, which,
falling first on Egypt, was unhappily refracted from its ruins upon
Jewish soil. An apt symbol of the insensibility of Christian Ethics
to animals, while in other points its similarity to the Indian is so
great, may be found in the circumstance that John the Baptist comes
before us in all respects like a Hindu Sannyasin,[9] except that he
is clothed in skins: a thing which would be, as is well known, an
abomination in the eyes of every follower of Brahmanism or Buddhism.
The Royal Society of Calcutta only received their copy of the Vedas
on their distinctly promising that they would not have it bound in
leather, after European fashion. In silken binding, therefore, it is
now to be seen on the shelves of their library. Again: the Gospel story