Note 34 — Chapter XII · IF NON-TOL­ERA­TION WAS PART OF THE DI­VINE LAW A­MONG THE JEWS, AND WHETH­ER IT WAS AL­WAYS PUT IN PRAC­TICE.

Agreeable to my intention of making some useful notes upon this treatise, I shall here observe that although God is said to have made a covenant with Noah, and with all the beasts of the field, yet he permits him to eat of every thing that has the breath of life, excepting only the eating of blood, which he positively prohibits; and moreover adds that “the Lord will take vengeance of every beast by whom man’s blood shall be shed.” From these passages and several others of the like tenor, we may infer, with all the sages of ancient and present times, and with every person of enlightened conceptions, that beasts are endowed with some knowledge. We do not find God making a covenant with trees or with stones that have no sense; but He does with the beasts, whom it has pleased Him to endow with senses, frequently more exquisite than our own, and consequently with those ideas that are necessarily connected with sense. It is for this reason that He prohibits the barbarous custom of feeding upon their blood, the blood being the source of life, and consequently of sense. Take away all the blood from an animal and all his organs will immediately cease from action. It is therefore with the greatest justice that we find it said in so many different parts of the Holy Scripture, that the soul, that is to say, what was called the sensitive soul, is in the blood; an opinion perfectly agreeable to nature, and as such received by all nations. It is upon this opinion that we found that pity which we ought to show to all animals. It is one of the seven precepts of the Noachides that were adopted by the Jews, that no one shall eat the limb of a living animal. This precept is a proof that mankind had formerly the cruelty to mutilate animals in order to feast upon the limbs so cut off, and to leave the creatures living, in order to feed successively upon the other parts of their bodies; a custom which we find to have actually subsisted among some barbarous nations—witness the sacrifices offered in the island of Chios to Bacchus Omadios, or the eater of raw flesh. God, by permitting the flesh of animals to serve us for food, seems to recommend them to our humanity. It must be confessed that there is great cruelty in putting them to torture, and that nothing but custom could have lessened in us the natural abhorrence of slaughtering an animal that we have fed with our own hands. There have in all times been sects who have made a religious scruple of such practices, as do to this day all the inhabitants of the Peninsula of the Ganges. The whole sect of Pythagoreans, both in Greece and Italy, constantly abstained from the eating of flesh. And Porphyry, in his book upon “Abstinence,” reproaches his disciples with having quitted their sect only for the sake of indulging an inhuman appetite. It is in my opinion a giving up of the light of reason, to pretend to assert that beasts are no more than mere machines; for is it not a manifest contradiction to acknowledge that God has given them the organs of sense, and then to affirm that they have no sense? Besides, I think one must never have made any observation upon animals, not to distinguish in them the different cries of want, suffering, joy, fear, love, anger, and indeed all other affections of the mind or body; surely, it would be very strange that they should so well express what they have no sense of! This remark may furnish abundant matter of reflection to inquisitive minds, in relation to the power and goodness of the Creator, who has been pleased to bestow life, sense, ideas, and memory on those beings whose organs he has formed with His own all-powerful hand. As to us, we neither know how these organs are formed, how they are unfolded, in what manner we receive life, nor by what laws sense, ideas, memory, and will are annexed to that life; and yet in this dark and ternal state of ignorance inherent to our natures, we are perpetually disputing with, and persecuting one another, like the bulls of the field, who fight with their horns, without knowing for what use, or in what manner those horns were given them.