The Island of Doctor Moreau - H. G. Wells (little readers txt) 📗

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my physiological lecture to you.”

 

And forthwith, beginning in the tone of a man supremely bored,

but presently warming a little, he explained his work to me.

He was very simple and convincing. Now and then there was a touch

of sarcasm in his voice. Presently I found myself hot with shame at our

mutual positions.

 

The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men.

They were animals, humanised animals,—triumphs of vivisection.

 

“You forget all that a skilled vivisector can do with living things,”

said Moreau. “For my own part, I’m puzzled why the things

I have done here have not been done before. Small efforts,

of course, have been made,—amputation, tongue-cutting, excisions.

Of course you know a squint may be induced or cured by surgery?

Then in the case of excisions you have all kinds of secondary changes,

pigmentary disturbances, modifications of the passions, alterations in

the secretion of fatty tissue. I have no doubt you have heard of

these things?”

 

“Of course,” said I. “But these foul creatures of yours—”

 

“All in good time,” said he, waving his hand at me; “I am only beginning.

Those are trivial cases of alteration. Surgery can do better things

than that. There is building up as well as breaking down and changing.

You have heard, perhaps, of a common surgical operation resorted to in

cases where the nose has been destroyed: a flap of skin is cut from

the forehead, turned down on the nose, and heals in the new position.

This is a kind of grafting in a new position of part of an animal

upon itself. Grafting of freshly obtained material from another

animal is also possible,—the case of teeth, for example.

The grafting of skin and bone is done to facilitate healing:

the surgeon places in the middle of the wound pieces of skin snipped

from another animal, or fragments of bone from a victim freshly killed.

Hunter’s cock-spur—possibly you have heard of that—flourished on

the bull’s neck; and the rhinoceros rats of the Algerian zouaves are

also to be thought of,—monsters manufactured by transferring a slip

from the tail of an ordinary rat to its snout, and allowing it to heal in

that position.”

 

“Monsters manufactured!” said I. “Then you mean to tell me—”

 

“Yes. These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought

into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of

living forms, my life has been devoted. I have studied for years,

gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I

am telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical

anatomy years ago, but no one had the temerity to touch it.

It is not simply the outward form of an animal which I can change.

The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also be made

to undergo an enduring modification,—of which vaccination and other

methods of inoculation with living or dead matter are examples

that will, no doubt, be familiar to you. A similar operation is

the transfusion of blood,—with which subject, indeed, I began.

These are all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more extensive,

were the operations of those mediaeval practitioners who made

dwarfs and beggar-cripples, show-monsters,—some vestiges of whose

art still remain in the preliminary manipulation of the young

mountebank or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives an account of them

in `L’Homme qui Rit.’—But perhaps my meaning grows plain now.

You begin to see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue

from one part of an animal to another, or from one animal to another;

to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth; to modify

the articulations of its limbs; and, indeed, to change it in its most

intimate structure.

 

“And yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought

as an end, and systematically, by modern investigators until I took it up!

Some of such things have been hit upon in the last resort of surgery;

most of the kindred evidence that will recur to your mind has been

demonstrated as it were by accident,—by tyrants, by criminals,

by the breeders of horses and dogs, by all kinds of untrained

clumsy-handed men working for their own immediate ends.

I was the first man to take up this question armed with antiseptic surgery,

and with a really scientific knowledge of the laws of growth.

Yet one would imagine it must have been practised in secret before.

Such creatures as the Siamese Twins—And in the vaults of

the Inquisition. No doubt their chief aim was artistic torture,

but some at least of the inquisitors must have had a touch of

scientific curiosity.”

 

“But,” said I, “these things—these animals talk!”

 

He said that was so, and proceeded to point out that the possibility

of vivisection does not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis.

A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate

than the bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find

the promise of a possibility of superseding old inherent instincts by

new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas.

Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he said,

is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct;

pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed

sexuality into religious emotion. And the great difference

between man and monkey is in the larynx, he continued,—

in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which

thought could be sustained. In this I failed to agree with him,

but with a certain incivility he declined to notice my objection.

He repeated that the thing was so, and continued his account of

his work.

 

I asked him why he had taken the human form as a model.

There seemed to me then, and there still seems to me now, a strange

wickedness for that choice.

 

He confessed that he had chosen that form by chance. “I might just

as well have worked to form sheep into llamas and llamas into sheep.

I suppose there is something in the human form that appeals

to the artistic turn more powerfully than any animal shape can.

But I’ve not confined myself to man-making. Once or twice—” He was silent,

for a minute perhaps. “These years! How they have slipped by!

And here I have wasted a day saving your life, and am now wasting an hour

explaining myself!”

 

“But,” said I, “I still do not understand. Where is your justification

for inflicting all this pain? The only thing that could excuse

vivisection to me would be some application—”

 

“Precisely,” said he. “But, you see, I am differently constituted.

We are on different platforms. You are a materialist.”

 

“I am not a materialist,” I began hotly.

 

“In my view—in my view. For it is just this question of pain

that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick;

so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies

your propositions about sin,—so long, I tell you, you are

an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.

This pain—”

 

I gave an impatient shrug at such sophistry.

 

“Oh, but it is such a little thing! A mind truly opened to

what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing.

It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust,

invisible long before the nearest star could be attained—it may be,

I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur.

But the laws we feel our way towards—Why, even on this earth, even among

living things, what pain is there?”

 

As he spoke he drew a little penknife from his pocket, opened the

smaller blade, and moved his chair so that I could see his thigh.

Then, choosing the place deliberately, he drove the blade into

his leg and withdrew it.

 

“No doubt,” he said, “you have seen that before. It does not hurt

a pin-prick. But what does it show? The capacity for pain is not

needed in the muscle, and it is not placed there,—is but little

needed in the skin, and only here and there over the thigh is

a spot capable of feeling pain. Pain is simply our intrinsic

medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us. Not all living

flesh is painful; nor is all nerve, not even all sensory nerve.

There’s no tint of pain, real pain, in the sensations of the optic nerve.

If you wound the optic nerve, you merely see flashes of light,—

just as disease of the auditory nerve merely means a humming

in our ears. Plants do not feel pain, nor the lower animals;

it’s possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish do not

feel pain at all. Then with men, the more intelligent they become,

the more intelligently they will see after their own welfare,

and the less they will need the goad to keep them out of danger.

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out

of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain

gets needless.

 

“Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be.

It may be, I fancy, that I have seen more of the ways of this world’s

Maker than you,—for I have sought his laws, in my way, all my life,

while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies.

And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell.

Pleasure and pain—bah! What is your theologian’s ecstasy but

Mahomet’s houri in the dark? This store which men and women set

on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them,—

the mark of the beast from which they came! Pain, pain and pleasure,

they are for us only so long as we wriggle in the dust.

 

“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me.

That is the only way I ever heard of true research going.

I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer,

and got a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible?

You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator,

what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine

the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!

The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature,

but a problem! Sympathetic pain,—all I know of it I remember

as a thing I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted—it was

the one thing I wanted—to find out the extreme limit of plasticity

in a living shape.”

 

“But,” said I, “the thing is an abomination—”

 

“To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter,”

he continued. “The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorse-less

as Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I

was pursuing; and the material has—dripped into the huts yonder.

It is really eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery

and six Kanakas. I remember the green stillness of the island

and the empty ocean about us, as though it was yesterday.

The place seemed waiting for me.

 

“The stores were landed and the house was built. The Kanakas founded

some huts near the ravine. I went to work here upon what I had brought

with me. There were some disagreeable things happened at first.

I began with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip

of the scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear

and left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I

had finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented