and lives should know itself redeemed, so soon as it was grasped as pattern and example to be followed.” [985W-{10/79}Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 202-203]
[986W-{10/79}Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 204]
[P. 204] {FEUER} “The wisdom of the Brahmins, nay, of every cultured pagan race, is lost to us: with the disowning of our true relation to the beasts, we see ananimalised – in the worst sense – and more than an animalised, a devilised world before us. There’s not a truth to which, in our self-seeking and self-interest, we are not ready to shut our eyes even when able to perceive it: herein consists our Civilisation. (…) Apart from, but almost simultaneously with the outcrop of that torturing of animals in the name of an impossible science, an honest inquirer, a careful breeder and comparer, a scientific friend of beasts, laid once more open to us men the teachings of primeval wisdom, according to which the same thing breathes in animals that lends us life ourselves; ay, showed us past all doubt that we descend from them. In the spirit of our unbelieving century, this knowledge may prove our surest guide to a correct estimate of our relation to the animals; and perhaps it is on this road alone, that we might again arrive at a real religion, as taught to us by the Redeemer and testified by his example, the religion of true Human Love.” [986W-{10/79}Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 204]
[987W-{10/79}Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 206]
[P. 206] {FEUER} {anti-FEUER/NIET} “To the beasts, who have been our schoolmasters in all the arts by which we trapped and made them subject to us, man was superior in nothing save deceit and cunning, by no means in courage or bravery; for the animal will fight to its last breath, indifferent to wounds or death … . To base man’s dignity upon his pride, compared with that of animals, would be mistaken; and our victory over them, their subjugation, we can only attribute to our greater art of dissembling. That art we highly boast of; we call it ‘reason’ (‘Vernunft’) and proudly think it marks us from the animals: for look you! It can make us like to God himself – as to which, however, Mephistopheles has his private opinion, concluding that the only use man made of reason was to ‘be more bestial than any beast.’ “ [987W-{10/79}Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 206]
[988W-{10/79}Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 207]
[P. 207] {FEUER} {anti-FEUER/NIET} “ … quite apart from their value in the eyes of the world, in his sufferings and death man is able to recognise a blessed expiation;whereas the beast, without one ulterior thought of moral advantage, sacrifices itself wholly and purely to love and lealty – though this also is explained by our physiologists as a simple chemical reaction of certain elementary substances.” [988W-{10/79}Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 207]
