Section 9

" But," said I, " these things — these animals

tmt**

He said that was so, and proceeded to point
out that the possibility of vivisection does not
stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. A pig
may be educated. The mental structure is even
less determinate than the bodily. In our grow-
ing science of hypnotism we find the promise of
a possibility of superseding old inherent instincts
by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing
the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed
of what we call moral education, he said, is
such an artificial modification and perversion of
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.Doctor Moreau explains.

instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous
self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into reli-
gious emotion. And the great difference be-
tween man and monkey is in the larynx, he
continued, — in the incapacity to frame deli-
cately different sound-symbols by which thought
could be sustained. In this I failed to agree
with him, but with a certain incivility he de-
clined to notice my objection. He repeated
that the thing was so, and continued his account
of his work.

I asked him why he had taken the human
form as a model. There seemed to me then,
and there still seems to me now, a strange
wickedness for that choice.

He confessed that he had chosen that form
by chance. " I might just as well have worked
to form sheep into llamas and llamas into sheep.
I suppose there is something in the human form
that appeals to the artistic turn more powerfully
than any animal shape can. But I Ve not
confined myself to man-making. Once or
twice — " He was silent, for a minute perhaps.
"These years! How they have slipped by]
And here I have wasted a day saving your life,

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The Island of Doctor Moreau.

and am now wasting an hour explaining my-
self!"

"But," said I, "I still do not understand.
Where is your justification for inflicting all this
pain ? The only thing that could excuse vivi-
section to me would be some application — "

"Precisely," said he. "But, you see, I am
differently constituted. We are on different
platforms. You are a materialist."

"I am not a materialist," I began hotly.

" In my view — in my view. For it is just
this question of pain that parts us. So long as
visible or audible pain turns you sick ; so long
as your own pains drive you ; so long as pain
underlies your propositions about sin, — so long,
I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little
less obscurely what an animal feels. This
pain — "

I gave an impatient shrug at such sophistry.

" Oh, but it is such a little thing ! A mind
truly opened to what science has to teach must
see that it is a little thing. It may be that save
in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust,
invisible long before the nearest star could be
attained, — it may be, I say, that nowhere else

Doctor Moreau explains.

does this thing called pain occur. But the laws
we feel our way towards — Why, even on
this earth, even among living things, what pain
is there ?"

As he spoke he drew a little penknife from
his pocket, opened the smaller blade, and moved
his chair so that I could see his thigh. Then,
choosing the place deliberately, he drove the
blade into his leg and withdrew it.

" No doubt," he said, "you have seen that
before. It does not hurt a pin-prick. But what
does it show ? The capacity for pain is not
needed in the muscle, and it is not placed there,
— is but little needed in the skin, and only here
and there over the thigh is a spot capable of
feeling pain. Pain is simply our intrinsic med-
ical adviser to warn us and stimulate us. Not
all living flesh is painful ; nor is all nerve, not
even all sensory nerve. There Js no tint of pain,
real pain, in the sensations of the optic nerve.
If you wound the optic nerve, you merely
see flashes of light, — just as disease of the
auditory nerve merely means a humming in
our ears. Plants do not feel pain, nor the
lower animals; it's possible that such animals
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The Island of Doctor Moreau.

as the starfish and crayfish do not feel pain at all.
Then with men, the more intelligent they
become, the more intelligently they will see
after their own welfare, and the less they will
need the goad to keep them out of danger.
I never yet heard of a useless thing that
was not ground out of existence by evolution
sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets
needless.

" Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as
every sane man must be. It may be, I fancy,
that I have seen more of the ways of this world's
Maker than you, — for I have sought his laws,
in my way, all my life, while you, I understand,
have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you,
pleasure and pain have nothing to do with
heaven or hell. Pleasure and pain — bah !
What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's
houri in the dark ? This store which men and
women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is
the mark of the beast upon them, — the mark of
the beast from which they came ! Pain, pain
and pleasure, they are for us only so long as we
wriggle in the dust.

" You see, I went on with this research just

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Doctor Moreau explains.

the way it led me. That is the only way I
ever heard of true research going. I asked a
question, devised some method of obtaining an
answer, and got a fresh question. Was this
possible or that possible ? You cannot imagine
what this means to an investigator, what an
intellectual passion grows upon him ! You
cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight
of these intellectual desires! The thing before
you is no longer an animal, a fellow- creature,
but a problem ! Sympathetic pain, — all I
know of it I remember as a thing .1 used to
suffer from years ago. I wanted — fit was the
one thing I wanted — to find out the extreme
limit of plasticity in a living shape."

"But," said I, " the thing is an abomina-
tion—"

"To this day I have never troubled about
the ethics of the matter," he continued. " The
study of Nature makes a man at last as remorse-
less as Nature. I have gone on, not heeding
anything but the question I was pursuing ; and
the material has — dripped into the huts yonder.
It is really eleven years since we came here, I
and Montgomery and six Kanakas. I remember

The Island of Doctor Moreau.

the green stillness of the island and the empty
ocean about us, as though it was yesterday.
The place seemed waiting for me.

"The stores were landed and the house was
built. The Kanakas founded some huts near
the ravine. I went to work here upon what I
had brought with me. There were some dis-
agreeable things happened at first. I began with
a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a
slip of the scalpel. I took another sheep, and
made a thing of pain and fear and left it bound
up to heal. It looked quite human to me when
I had finished it ; but when I went to it I was
discontented with it. It remembered me, and
was terrified beyond imagination ; and it had
no more than the wits of a sheep. The more
I looked at it the clumsier it seemed, until at
last I put the monster out of its misery. These
animals without courage, these fear-haunted,
pain-driven things, without a spark of pugna-
cious energy to face torment, — they are no
good for man-making.

" Then I took a gorilla I had ; and upon that,
working with infinite care and mastering diffi-
culty after difficulty, I made my first man. All

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Doctor Moreau explains.

the week, night and day, I moulded him.
With him it was chiefly the brain that needed
moulding ; much had to be added, much
changed. I thought him a fair specimen of the
negroid type when I had finished him, and he
lay bandaged, bound, and motionless before me.
It was only when his life was assured that I left
him and came into this room again, and found
Montgomery much as you are. He had heard
some of the cries as the thing grew human, —
cries like those that disturbed you so. I did n't
take him completely into my confidence at first.
And the Kanakas too, had realised something of
it. They were scared out of their wits by the
sight of me. I got Montgomery over to me —
in a way ; but I and he had the hardest job to
prevent the Kanakas deserting. Finally they
did ; and so we lost the yacht. I spent many
days educating the brute, — altogether I had
him for three or four months. I taught him the
rudiments of English ; gave him ideas of count-
ing ; even made the thing read the alphabet.
But at that he was slow, though I 've met with
idiots slower. He began with a clean sheet,
mentally ; had no memories left in his mind of

The Island of Doctor Moreau.

what he had been. When his scars were quite
healed, and he was no longer anything but pain-
ful and stiff, and able to converse a little, I took
him yonder and introduced him to the Kanakas
as an interesting stowaway.

" They were horribly afraid of him at first,
somehow, — which offended me rather, for I
was conceited about him ; but his ways seemed
so mild, and he was so abject, that after a time
they received him and took his education in
hand. He was quick to learn, very imitative
and adaptive, and built himself a hovel rather
better, it seemed to me, than their own shanties.
There was one among the boys a bit of
a missionary, and he taught the thing to read,
or at least to pick out letters, and gave him
some rudimentary ideas of morality ; but it
seems the beast's habits were not all that is
desirable.

"I rested from work for some days after this,
and was in a mind to write an account of the
whole affair to wake up English physiology.
Then I came upon the creature squatting up in
a tree and gibbering at two of the Kanakas who
had been teasing him. I threatened him, told
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Doctor Moreau explains.

him the inhumanity of such a proceeding,
aroused his sense of shame, and came home
resolved to do better before I took my work
back to England. I have been doing better.
But somehow the things drift back again : the
stubborn beast-flesh grows day by day back again.
But I mean to do better things still. I mean to
conquer that. This puma —

" But that Js the story. All the Kanaka boys
are dead now ; one fell overboard of the launch,
and one died of a wounded heel that he poisoned
in some way with plant-juice. Three went
away in the yacht, and I suppose and hope
were drowned. The other one — was killed.
Well, I have replaced them. Montgomery
went on much as you are disposed to do at first,
and then — "

"What became of the other one?" said
I, sharply, — " the other Kanaka who was
killed?"

" The fact is, after I had made a number
of human creatures I made a Thing." He
hesitated.

"Yes," said I.

"It was killed."

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The Island of Doctor Moreau.

"I don't understand," said I; "do you
mean to say — ' '

" It killed the Kanakas — yes. It killed sev-
eral other things that it caught. We chased it
for a couple of days. It only got loose by
accident — I never meant it to get away. It
was n't finished. It was purely an experiment.
It was a limbless thing, with a horrible face,
that writhed along the ground in a serpentine
fashion. It was immensely strong, and in
infuriating pain. It lurked in the woods for
some days, until we hunted it ; and then it
wriggled into the northern part of the island, and
we divided the party to close in upon it.
Montgomery insisted upon coming with me.
The man had a rifle; and when his body was
found, one of the barrels was curved into the
shape of an S and very nearly bitten through.
Montgomery shot the thing. After that I stuck
to the ideal of humanity — except for little
things."

He became silent. I sat in silence watching
his face.

" So for twenty years altogether — counting
nine years in England — I have been going on ;
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Doctor Moreau explains.

and there is still something in everything I do
that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges
me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above
my level, sometimes I fall below it ; but always
I fall short of the things I dream. The human
shape I can get now, almost with ease, so that it
is lithe and graceful, or thick and strong ; but
often there is trouble with the hands and the
claws, — painful things, that I dare not shape
too freely. But it is in the subtle grafting and
reshaping one must needs do to the brain that
my trouble lies. The intelligence is often
oddly low, with unaccountable blank ends, un-
expected gaps. And least satisfactory of all is
something that I cannot touch, somewhere — I
cannot determine where — in the seat of the
emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm
humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst
forth suddenly and inundate the whole being of
the creature with anger, hate, or fear. These
creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to
you so soon as you began to observe them ; but
to me, just after I make them, they seem to be
indisputably human beings. It Js afterwards, as
I observe them, that the persuasion fades. First
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The Island of Doctor Moreau.

one animal trait, then another, creeps to the
surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer
yet ! Each time I dip a living creature into the
bath of burning pain, I say, ' This time I will
burn out all the animal ; this time I will make
a rational creature of my own ! * After all,
what is ten years ? Men have been a hundred
thousand in the making." He thought darkly.
" But I am drawing near the fastness. This
puma of mine — " After a silence, "And
they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from
them the beast begins to creep back, begins to
assert itself again." Another long silence.

" Then you take the things you make into
those dens?" said I.

" They go. I turn them out when I begin
to feel the beast in them, and presently they
wander there. They all dread this house and
me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity
over there. Montgomery knows about it, for
he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one
or two of them to our service. He *s ashamed
of it, but I believe he half likes some of those
beasts. It's his business, not mine. They
only sicken me with a sense of failure. I
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Doctor Moreau explains.

take no interest in them. I fancy they
follow in the lines the Kanaka missionary
marked out, and have a kind of mockery
of a rational life, poor beasts ! There ' s some-
thing they call the Law. Sing hymns about
'all thine.' They build themselves their
dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs — marry even.
But I can see through it all, see into their very
souls, and see there nothing but the souls of
beasts, beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to
live and gratify themselves. — Yet they 're odd ;
complex, like everything else alive. There is a
kind of upward striving in them, part vanity,
part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity.
It only mocks me. I have some hope of that
puma. I have worked hard at her head and
brain —

"And now," said he, standing up after a
long gap of silence, during which we had each
pursued our own thoughts, " what do you
think? Are you in fear of me still?"

I looked at him, and saw but a white-faced,

white-haired man, with calm eyes. Save for

his serenity, the touch almost of beauty that

resulted from his set tranquillity and his magnifi-

10 145

The Island of Doctor Moreau.

cent build, he might have passed muster among
a hundred other comfortable old gentlemen.
Then I shivered. By way of answer to his
second question, I handed him a revolver with
either hand.

"Keep them," he said, and snatched at a
yawn. He stood up, stared at me for a moment,
and smiled. " You have had two eventful
days," said he. "I should advise some sleep.
I'm glad it's all clear. Good-night." He
thought me over for a moment, then went out
by the inner door.

I immediately turned the key in the outer
one. I sat down again ; sat for a time in a
kind of stagnant mood, so weary, emotionally,
mentally, and physically, that I could not think
beyond the point at which he had left me.
The black window stared at me like an eye.
At last with an effort I put out the light and
got into the hammock. Very soon I was
asleep.