Here plainly Greek meets Greek, and we had better let the accusation of egotism alone. But apart from this point, the above summary of the cat’s nature is about as true as the following summary of the sportsman’s nature from the cat’s point of view.
“The sportsman is a quiet, domestic creature, fond of his comforts and his meals; he is generally found smoking in an armchair before the fire. The only thing which interferes with his domesticity is his tendency to absent himself from the house for hours together; this appears to be the result of a curious mania quite foreign to his nature; and it will cause him even to miss his meals. If you come upon him at such times he is engaged in a prosaic kind of wholesale slaughter; he has no exciting chases after his prey, no display of ability, no well-planned ambushes; but he kills at a distance through an unpleasantly noisy instrument. The sportsman, too, is absolutely dangerous to life at such time, and I have known cats fall victims to his rage; whereas, if you meet him in his normal condition, he is usually quite tame; you can safely leave kittens in the room with him, and I have never known him kill a caged bird. The keeper is a very dangerous sort of sportsman, and must be regarded as radically unsafe. The difference between sportsmen and keepers is much the same as that between capricious bulls and mad bulls.”
The fact is, that the usual judgment of cats rests on a total misapprehension of the scope of a cat’s life; and the root of the misunderstanding goes wider and deeper than this. The average human being takes account only of those qualities of animals which have some practical bearing on human life; even the animal lover is wont to take account only of animal qualities, physical, mental, and, at a stretch, moral; whereas that which is the pivot of human life and human relations; that which, rudimentary as it is in animals, is still the pivot of animal qualities--namely, the force of personality--is altogether left out of account.
No judgment of animals can be adequate, or in any sense true, which does not take account of personality, more or less developed, and of the scope of the creature’s life as determined by it.