The anti-Christmas
humanitarian, in seeking to have a sympathy with a turkey which no man
can have with a turkey, loses the sympathy he has already with the
happiness of millions of the poor.
It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet.
Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian
non-resistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing. They
are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be resisted,
looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the conquered.
Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling and
dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both
based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug. But
I am specially certain that the extreme of vegetarian humanity is, as I
have said, akin to the extreme of scientific cruelty--they both permit a
dubious speculation to interfere with their ordinary charity. The sound
moral rule in such matters as vivisection always presents itself to me
in this way. There is no ethical necessity more essential and vital than
this: that casuistical exceptions, though admitted, should be admitted
as exceptions. And it follows from this, I think, that, though we may do
a horrid thing in a horrid situation, we must be quite certain that we
actually and already are in that situation.
Pages:
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270