A _phoca_ has just come up with something white in its mouth, which it is eating--a fish, no doubt. This, too, it does in a playful manner, flinging open its jaws, and seeming to disport with it, in them. Full of the enjoyment of life they are; and the way up, through evolution, is to leave all this, and to acquire a multitude of cares, with gluttony, diseases, vices, cant--with a pat on the back from a poet, or so, now and again, making us out to be gods, and telling us to go to war. A queer scheme, "a miserable world," as Jacques says--but not for seals. Except through us, that is to say. We do skin them alive, which raises another point. Not only is man--highly civilised man--the most miserable being that exists, or has ever existed, upon this planet, but it is through him, for the most part, that the robe of misery has been flung down upon every other being that shares it with him. He plays, in fact, the part of a devil in nature, but because his fellow-beings are below himself in intelligence, he is not ashamed of this. Were he, however, to be treated in a similar way by some species as superior, mentally, to himself, as he is to animals, he might see the matter differently.
Does right exist at all, then, as apart from might? That which does not rest upon some active principle in the scheme of nature, does not, really, exist. We only fancy it, and thereby are only the more shocked at the continual negation of what we fancy. In nature there is no law of right, only of might, but, as man develops, he becomes, gradually, aware that the cruel exercise of this might does not always lead to the best results. Therefore, he exercises it more mercifully, and, in doing so, thinks that he acts according to the law of right, as against that of might, whereas what he really does is to carry out the law of might in a more judicious manner. The idea that animals have rights, in regard to us, has, for me, no meaning. How can they have what they cannot conceive of having? If they have, so must vegetables. Whenever they enforce something against us, it is through might that they do it, and this might we have, in a greater degree, over them. The whole question is how, in the highest sense, it is best to exercise it. For the idea of right, therefore, I would substitute that of might, judiciously exercised, as the highest ideal that is in accordance with the scheme of nature. All improvement, I believe, in the history of mankind--with the case against vivisection, now--can be reduced to that principle; the other is a delusion. The only right that nature knows anything about is the right which she has conferred on every creature, to do whatever it is strong enough to do--and that is might. But when might is well guided, all is well.