of law or study of jurisprudence, not even by simple vindictiveness, but by the superstition that a calamity of any sort must be expiated by a human sacrifice; so the wickednesses and stupidities of our medicine men are rooted in superstitions that have no more to do with science than the traditional ceremony of christening an ironclad has to do with the effectiveness of its armament.  We have only to turn to Macaulay’s description of the treatment of Charles II in his last illness to see how strongly his physicians felt that their only chance of cheating death was by outraging nature in tormenting and disgusting their unfortunate patient.  True, this was more than two centuries ago; but I have heard my own nineteenth-century grandfather describe the cupping and firing and nauseous medicines of his time with perfect credulity as to their beneficial effects; and some more modern treatments appear to me quite as barbarous.  It is in this way that vivisection pays the doctor.  It appeals to the fear and credulity of the savage in us; and without fear and credulity half the private doctor’s occupation and seven-eighths of his influence would be gone.

THE HIGHER MOTIVE.  THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

But the greatest force of all on the side of vivisection is the mighty and indeed divine force of curiosity.  Here we have no decaying tribal instinct which men strive to root out of themselves as they strive to root out the tiger’s lust for blood.  On the contrary, the curiosity of the ape, or of the child who pulls out the legs and wings of a fly to see what it will do without them, or who, on being told that a cat dropped out of the window will always fall on its legs, immediately tries the experiment on the nearest cat from the highest window in the house (I protest I did it myself from the first floor only), is as nothing compared to the thirst for knowledge of the philosopher, the poet, the biologist, and the naturalist.  I have always despised Adam because he had to be tempted by the woman, as she was by the serpent, before he could he induced to pluck the apple from the tree of knowledge.  I should have swallowed every apple on the tree the moment the owner’s back was turned.  When Gray said “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise,” he forgot that it is godlike to be wise; and since nobody wants bliss particularly, or could stand more than a very brief taste of it if it were attainable, and since everybody, by the deepest law of the Life Force, desires to be godlike, it is stupid, and indeed blasphemous and despairing, to hope that the thirst for knowledge will either diminish or consent to be subordinated to any other end whatsoever.  We shall see later on that the claim that has arisen in this way for the unconditioned pursuit of knowledge is as idle as all dreams of unconditioned activity; but none the less the right to knowledge must be regarded as a fundamental human right.  The fact that men