Rontgen rays need not hurt the patient; and spectrum analysis
involves no destruction. After such triumphs of humane experiment
and reasoning, it is useless to assure us that there is no other
key to knowledge except cruelty. When the vivisector offers us
that assurance, we reply simply and contemptuously, "You mean
that you are not clever or humane or energetic enough to find
one."

CRUELTY FOR ITS OWN SAKE

It will now, I hope, be clear why the attack on vivisection is
not an attack on the right to knowledge: why, indeed, those who
have the deepest conviction of the sacredness of that right are
the leaders of the attack. No knowledge is finally impossible of
human attainment; for even though it may be beyond our present
capacity, the needed capacity is not unattainable. Consequently
no method of investigation is the only method; and no law
forbidding any particular method can cut us off from the
knowledge we hope to gain by it. The only knowledge we lose by
forbidding cruelty is knowledge at first hand of cruelty itself,
which is precisely the knowledge humane people wish to be spared.

But the question remains: Do we all really wish to be spared that
knowledge? Are humane methods really to be preferred to cruel
ones? Even if the experiments come to nothing, may not their
cruelty be enjoyed for its own sake, as a sensational luxury? Let
us face these questions boldly, not shrinking from the fact that
cruelty is one of the primitive pleasures of mankind, and that
the detection of its Protean disguises as law, education,
medicine, discipline, sport and so forth, is one of the most