The Fable of the Bees (Philosophy Study). Bernard Mandeville

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СКАЧАТЬ reflect on all this, and not think it an extravagant piece of nicety, that even those who receive alms of the parish, should not only have whole garments made of this operose manufacture, but likewise that as soon as they are soiled, to restore them to their pristine purity, they should make use of one of the most judicious as well as difficult compositions that chemistry can boast of; with which, dissolved in water by the help of fire, the most detersive, and yet innocent lixivium is prepared that human industry has hitherto been able to invent?

      It is certain, time was that the things I speak of would have bore those lofty expressions, and in which every body would have reasoned after the same manner; but the age we live in would call a man fool, who should talk of extravagance and nicety, if he saw a poor woman, after having wore her crown cloth smock a whole week, wash it with a bit of stinking soap of a groat a pound.

      The arts of brewing, and making bread, have by slow degrees been brought to the perfection they now are in, but to have invented them at once, and à priori, would have required more knowledge and a deeper insight into the nature of fermentation, than the greatest philosopher has hitherto been endowed with; yet the fruits of both are now enjoyed by the meanest of our species, and a starving wretch knows not how to make a more humble, or a more modest petition, than by asking for a bit of bread, or a draught of small beer.

      Man has learned by experience, that nothing was softer than the small plumes and down of birds, and found that heaped together, they would by their elasticity, gently resist any incumbent weight, and heave up again of themselves as soon as the pressure is over. To make use of them to sleep upon was, no doubt, first invented to compliment the vanity as well as ease of the wealthy and potent; but they are long since become so common, that almost every body lies upon featherbeds, and to substitute flocks in the room of them is counted a miserable shift of the most necessitous. What a vast height must luxury have been arrived to, before it could be reckoned a hardship to repose upon the soft wool of animals!

      From caves, huts, hovels, tents, and barracks, with which mankind took up at first, we are come to warm and well-wrought houses, and the meanest habitations to be seen in cities, are regular buildings, contrived by persons skilled in proportions and architecture. If the ancient Britons and Gauls should come out of their graves, with what amazement would they gaze on the mighty structures every where raised for the poor! Should they behold the magnificence of a Chelsey-College, a Greenwich-Hospital, or what surpasses all them, a Des Invalides at Paris, and see the care, the plenty, the superfluities and pomp, which people that have no possessions at all are treated with in those stately palaces, those who were once the greatest and richest of the land would have reason to envy the most reduced of our species now.

      Another piece of luxury the poor enjoy, that is not looked upon as such, and which there is no doubt but the wealthiest in a golden age would abstain from, is their making use of the flesh of animals to eat. In what concerns the fashions and manners of the ages men live in, they never examine into the real worth or merit of the cause, and generally judge of things not as their reason, but custom direct them. Time was when the funeral rites in the disposing of the dead, were performed by fire, and the cadavers of the greatest emperors were burnt to ashes. Then burying the corps in the ground was a funeral for slaves, or made a punishment for the worst of malefactors. Now nothing is decent or honourable but interring; and burning the body is reserved for crimes of the blackest dye. At some times we look upon trifles with horror, at other times we can behold enormities without concern. If we see a man walk with his hat on in a church, though out of service time, it shocks us; but if on a Sunday night we meet half a dozen fellows drunk in the street, the sight makes little or no impression upon us. If a woman at a merry-making dresses in man’s clothes, it is reckoned a frolic amongst friends, and he that finds too much fault with it is counted censorious: upon the stage it is done without reproach, and the most virtuous ladies will dispense with it in an actress, though every body has a full view of her legs and thighs; but if the same woman, as soon as she has petticoats on again, should show her leg to a man as high as her knee, it would be a very immodest action, and every body will call her impudent for it.

      I have often thought, if it was not for this tyranny which custom usurps over us, that men of any tolerable good-nature could never be reconciled to the killing of so many animals, for their daily food, as long as the bountiful earth so plentifully provides them with varieties of vegetable dainties. I know that reason excites our compassion but faintly, and therefore I would not wonder how men should so little commiserate such imperfect creatures as crayfish, oysters, cockles, and indeed all fish in general: as they are mute, and their inward formation, as well as outward figure, vastly different from ours, they express themselves unintelligibly to us, and therefore it is not strange that their grief should not affect our understanding which it cannot reach; for nothing stirs us to pity so effectually, as when the symptoms of misery strike immediately upon our senses, and I have seen people moved at the noise a live lobster makes upon the spit, that could have killed half a dozen fowls with pleasure. But in such perfect animals as sheep and oxen, in whom the heart, the brain and nerves differ so little from ours, and in whom the separation of the spirits from the blood, the organs of sense, and consequently feeling itself, are the same as they are in human creatures; I cannot imagine how a man not hardened in blood and massacre, is able to see a violent death, and the pangs of it, without concern.

      In answer to this, most people will think it sufficient to say, that all things being allowed to be made for the service of man, there can be no cruelty in putting creatures to the use they were designed for; but I have heard men make this reply, while their nature within them has reproached them with the falsehood of the assertion. There is of all the multitude not one man in ten but what will own (if he was not brought up in a slaughter-house), that of all trades he could never have been a butcher; and I question whether ever any body so much as killed a chicken without reluctancy the first time. Some people are not to be persuaded to taste of any creatures they have daily seen and been acquainted with, while they were alive; others extend their scruple no further than to their own poultry, and refuse to eat what they fed and took care of themselves; yet all of them will feed heartily and without remorse on beef, mutton, and fowls, when they are bought in the market. In this behaviour, methinks, there appears something like a consciousness of guilt, it looks as if they endeavoured to save themselves from the imputation of a crime (which they know sticks somewhere) by removing the cause of it as far as they can from themselves; and I can discover in it some strong remains of primitive pity and innocence, which all the arbitrary power of custom, and the violence of luxury, have not yet been able to conquer.

      What I build upon I shall be told is a folly that wise men are not guilty of: I own it; but while it proceeds from a real passion inherent in our nature, it is sufficient to demonstrate, that we are born with a repugnancy to the killing, and consequently the eating of animals; for it is impossible that a natural appetite should ever prompt us to act, or desire others to do, what we have an aversion to, be it as foolish as it will.

      Every body knows, that surgeons, in the cure of dangerous wounds and fractures, the extirpations of limbs, and other dreadful operations, are often compelled to put their patients to extraordinary torments, and that the more desperate and calamitous cases occur to them, the more the outcries and bodily sufferings of others must become familiar to them; for this reason, our English law, out of a most affectionate regard to the lives of the subject, allows them not to be of any jury upon life and death, as supposing that their practice itself is sufficient to harden and extinguish in them that tenderness, without which no man is capable of setting a true value upon the lives of his fellow-creatures. Now, if we ought to have no concern for what we do to brute beasts, and there was not imagined to be any cruelty in killing them, why should of all callings butchers, and only they, jointly with surgeons, be excluded from being jurymen by the same law?

      I shall urge nothing of what Pythagoras and many other wise men have said concerning this barbarity of eating flesh; I have gone too much out of my way already, and shall therefore beg the reader, if he would have any more of this, to run over the following fable, or else, if he be tired, to let it alone, with an assurance that in doing of either he shall equally oblige me.

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