| ❖ மறைமலையம்-1 ❖ |
and a thinking mind which form the foundation of his moral character, should have bestowed his thgought on the intimate relation in which he stands to lower animals which by serving him in many ways, make his existence happy and comfortable and have, therefore, strong claim on him to be treated kindly and protected from being slaughtered. Dimmed by impetuous passions and strong appetite the mind of carnivorous animals can pay no heed to the value and existence of other lives as they do to their own, but man who has risen far above them in point of culture and refinement of feelings should not have been so carried away by such brutal passions and appetency as to lose sight of the great value which every moving being sets so ardently on its own life and existence.
In what does the excellence of man consist? Is it not in the freedom of his will, in the power he can freely exercise to discriminate between what is good and what is evil? Is it not in the tenacity of his resolve to cling to that alone which brings happiness not only to him but to all moving beings that have a right to live being possessed like him with an instinct of self-preservation? This right given to every creature not by man but by Providence, this right to live in an organism even the seemingly trivial but truly marvellous stgructure of which the combined intelligence of all the scientific men in the world cannot raise, this right which each and evry moving creature possesses for the purpose of promoting the growth of its understanding and enlivening its capacity for enjoyment, if man, in his eagerness to fill his stomach, would still refuse to recognize, then the supreme ethical importance that is attached to his existence in the universal conception of the moral law becomes empty and meaningless; for, by this disregard he descends lower down in the scale of culture and delicacy of moral sense and joins the brute creations. It is, therefore, absolutely necessary that, in order to maintain his ethical status and widen the scope it affords him for a freer and fuller play of all his finer sensibilities which not only secure him against the troubles incident to lower forms of lives but also increase the extent and intensity of
