THE PLIGHT OF THE VIVISECTOR: by H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S.

IT is very well worth while to work out on Theosophical principles the plight of the vivisector himself. He is creating causes whose effects will take him a long time to be done with, more than one lifetime, effects connected with some very interesting and very little known laws of nature. His plight may presently appear worse than that of his animals.

By way of text we will take some non-vivisectional work recently carried out at the biological station of the Prater in Vienna, by Paul Kammerer. He has proved, says Cosmos,

that the maintenance of the lizard Lacerta Vivipara in an unaccustomedly warm temperature for several generations, transforms it from a live-young-bearing animal to an egg layer. This acquired property is retained even when the subsequent generations are returned to their normal conditions. We must remember that the live-young-bearing lizard ... may be characterized as an arctic-alpine animal. Its status as a glacial creature explains its live-young-bearing habit; the development of the young is evidently better assured in the mother's body than when the eggs are exposed to the vicissitudes of exterior cold.

Some other lizards, and the field cricket, have been made to vary by similar methods, the new characteristics being likewise transmitted.

What was that intelligence which, working within the body of the lizard, noted the warmer temperature without and knew at once that the hatching of the eggs within the protecting body of the mother, and the further development of the young there, were no longer necessary? We do not propose to admit that we are prejudging a dispute in using the word "intelligence." If it seem so now, it will not in ten years. No one will suggest the intelligence of the lizard itself. The ancients—not very ancient ancients, either—believed in the existence of certain classes of lesser "gods" constantly at work behind the visible veil of nature. When in a few years this belief reincarnates among the scientists as a necessary hypothesis (a reincarnation already beginning), some new name will have to be found for the collective intelligence of these beings. "Gods" is not a good word, neither for them nor for their directive superiors, the absolutely spiritual powers on the same plane of being as that spiritual soul of man whereof he knows so little.

The "gods" then, to use that word, have charge of the centers of life, the living beings, in all departments of nature, mineral, vegetable, and animal; contain and work in accordance with the principle of evolution both of form and intelligence; and guide the appearance of variations—not without occasional mistakes needing rectification. Kammerer unwittingly made an indirect appeal to them, and they responded by producing an interior physiological change corresponding with the change of exterior temperature which he maintained.

We come here upon specifically Theosophical criticisms of vivisection. The man who vivisects has made himself the enemy of conscious nature—at work in his own body as much as in that of the animal he injures.

To make the matter clearer, let us think of the One Supreme Intelligence of the universe as manifesting in two ways or directions: in the first, as the spiritual souls of men, and, lower down, as their minds; in the second, as the spiritual directive intelligences of nature and, lower down, as the lesser "gods" whom these direct. In time, when men's minds are sufficiently spiritualized and potentized, sufficiently at one with the omnipresent spirit of evolution and intent upon co-operating with it, they will themselves be able to direct the lesser gods, helping and guiding them in their work upon animal, plant, and mineral—the power of immense prolongation of their own lives then coming within their reach. There is already—as the abnormal success of men like Burbank shows—some interplay between man's mind and the working "gods"; whilst the relation between man's soul and the greater nature-powers, the directive, is very much closer. He who serves and studies nature in the right way, begins at once to stand nearer to her consciousness, and is at once the better for it on one or more planes of his being. The partnership begins. And a first way to serve her is to make her children, the animals, feel man as friend, a feeling which enables their minds to come into some measure of inner contact with his and thus be suddenly and immensely stimulated in their evolution.

There is vivisection attended with much immediate pain connected in the animal's mind with man as its cause; and other with little, say a hypodermic injection, the pain following later in the form of the disease sown by the syringe and often not connected by the animal with man at all.

Either way the operator is a disease-producer and has the mental attitude of one. To say that he is recognized by nature as such may seem absurd. But as he who really wills and pictures health, whether his own or that of some other, finally affects the nature-mind in his own body and—other things being co-ordinate—begins to move toward it: so likewise the constant willing and picture-making of disease and pain at last affects the same mind but in the contrary direction. The man moves and is moved away from health.

There are states of ill-health unattended, at any rate for a long time, by a single definite symptom. The activities of the bodily machine may maintain their relations, their general balance, yet drop as a whole to very low levels. If there is no radiance, no responsiveness to the finer forces of nature, no vital spring, there may yet be no point of actual friction, and to its human tenant the body may seem in average working order.

We say then that the preoccupations of the vivisector's mind have taken his body outside the conscious life-stream of nature, have stopped her constructive and vitalizing work. The body is not simply a living thing; it is an organized complex of living things, conscious centers, life-charged monads, far finer than any of the bacteria which the microscope has shown us or can show us. Drawn in from nature, they dwell with us a while and then return to her somewhat as the blood cells go to the lungs for aeration. It is the quality of our mental states which determines the quality of the elemental coming in and determines also the intervening history of those which leave. The circulation is constant, and if we lived ideal mental lives we could, as already said, achieve something like physical immortality. The monads would come back to us refreshed and recharged with electric vitality.

Death liberates them all. They take their ways into the nature-stream and are regenerated in nature's thought and life. The process continues during all the time between death and rebirth. Whilst the man, the soul, rests, his body (the subtler elements of it) is being refashioned and reinvigorated for him. At his rebirth his own monads, blended with those he receives from hereditary sources, are animating the infant form with which he connects himself and in which he will ultimately incarnate. So far as the thought and habit of his last life permitted—for, as said, they are absolutely sensitive to the thought-color of their owner's mind and feeling—they have been renewed.

But there will have been little renewal possible for them if that mind was filled with the color and thought of death, disease, pain, was occupied with the will to produce these—a will exactly oppositely directed to that of the worthy physician. They were untuned with nature's keynote during life and consequently return nearly unchanged—which, in medical language, will mean a case of congenital disease, ill-health, or deformity; and, as part of the penalty, the reaction of the physical defects and disease upon the mind and disposition of child and youth and man.

Nor does the penalty finish at that. The entire personality of such a child and man is in greater or less degree repellant to others, to children, to animals. The latter especially, feel him not as a friend but as enemy. Their dislike is instinctual. And all this will continue till in one or another life the man has been stung to the redress of the evil he has done, has returned kindliness for hostility year by year, has changed, freshened, and sweetened his thought and feeling and so by degrees every atom of his body.

Truly the plight of the vivisector is a thousandfold worse than that of the animal he worst outrages.