The_island_of_Dr._Moreau/chapters/Doctor Moreau Explains.tex

“And now, Prendick, I will explain,” said Doctor Moreau, so soon as we
had eaten and drunk. “I must confess that you are the most dictatorial
guest I ever entertained. I warn you that this is the last I shall do
to oblige you. The next thing you threaten to commit suicide about, I
shan’t do,—even at some personal inconvenience.”

He sat in my deck chair, a cigar half consumed in his white,
dexterous-looking fingers. The light of the swinging lamp fell on his
white hair; he stared through the little window out at the starlight. I
sat as far away from him as possible, the table between us and the
revolvers to hand. Montgomery was not present. I did not care to be
with the two of them in such a little room.

“You admit that the vivisected human being, as you called it, is, after
all, only the puma?” said Moreau. He had made me visit that horror in
the inner room, to assure myself of its inhumanity.

“It is the puma,” I said, “still alive, but so cut and mutilated as I
pray I may never see living flesh again. Of all vile—”

“Never mind that,” said Moreau; “at least, spare me those youthful
horrors. Montgomery used to be just the same. You admit that it is the
puma. Now be quiet, while I reel off my physiological lecture to you.”

And forthwith, beginning in the tone of a man supremely bored, but
presently warming a little, he explained his work to me. He was very
simple and convincing. Now and then there was a touch of sarcasm in his
voice. Presently I found myself hot with shame at our mutual positions.

The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were
animals, humanised animals,—triumphs of vivisection.

“You forget all that a skilled vivisector can do with living things,”
said Moreau. “For my own part, I’m puzzled why the things I have done
here have not been done before. Small efforts, of course, have been
made,—amputation, tongue-cutting, excisions. Of course you know a
squint may be induced or cured by surgery? Then in the case of
excisions you have all kinds of secondary changes, pigmentary
disturbances, modifications of the passions, alterations in the
secretion of fatty tissue. I have no doubt you have heard of these
things?”

“Of course,” said I. “But these foul creatures of yours—”

“All in good time,” said he, waving his hand at me; “I am only
beginning. Those are trivial cases of alteration. Surgery can do better
things than that. There is building up as well as breaking down and
changing. You have heard, perhaps, of a common surgical operation
resorted to in cases where the nose has been destroyed: a flap of skin
is cut from the forehead, turned down on the nose, and heals in the new
position. This is a kind of grafting in a new position of part of an
animal upon itself. Grafting of freshly obtained material from another
animal is also possible,—the case of teeth, for example. The grafting
of skin and bone is done to facilitate healing: the surgeon places in
the middle of the wound pieces of skin snipped from another animal, or
fragments of bone from a victim freshly killed. Hunter’s
cock-spur—possibly you have heard of that—flourished on the bull’s
neck; and the rhinoceros rats of the Algerian zouaves are also to be
thought of,—monsters manufactured by transferring a slip from the tail
of an ordinary rat to its snout, and allowing it to heal in that
position.”

“Monsters manufactured!” said I. “Then you mean to tell me—”

“Yes. These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into
new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my
life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge
as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing
new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no
one had the temerity to touch it. It is not simply the outward form of
an animal which I can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of
the creature, may also be made to undergo an enduring modification,—of
which vaccination and other methods of inoculation with living or dead
matter are examples that will, no doubt, be familiar to you. A similar
operation is the transfusion of blood,—with which subject, indeed, I
began. These are all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more
extensive, were the operations of those mediaeval practitioners who
made dwarfs and beggar-cripples, show-monsters,—some vestiges of whose
art still remain in the preliminary manipulation of the young
mountebank or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives an account of them in
‘L’Homme qui Rit.’—But perhaps my meaning grows plain now. You begin to
see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of
an animal to another, or from one animal to another; to alter its
chemical reactions and methods of growth; to modify the articulations
of its limbs; and, indeed, to change it in its most intimate structure.

“And yet this extraordinary branch of knowledge has never been sought
as an end, and systematically, by modern investigators until I took it
up! Some such things have been hit upon in the last resort of surgery;
most of the kindred evidence that will recur to your mind has been
demonstrated as it were by accident,—by tyrants, by criminals, by the
breeders of horses and dogs, by all kinds of untrained clumsy-handed
men working for their own immediate ends. I was the first man to take
up this question armed with antiseptic surgery, and with a really
scientific knowledge of the laws of growth. Yet one would imagine it
must have been practised in secret before. Such creatures as the
Siamese Twins—And in the vaults of the Inquisition. No doubt their
chief aim was artistic torture, but some at least of the inquisitors
must have had a touch of scientific curiosity.”

“But,” said I, “these things—these animals talk!”

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 growing 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 instinct; pugnacity is trained into
courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious
emotion. And the great difference between man and monkey is in the
larynx, he continued,—in the incapacity to frame delicately different
sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained. In this I failed to
agree with him, but with a certain incivility he declined 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 of mind 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, and am now wasting an hour
explaining myself!”

“But,” said I, “I still do not understand. Where is your justification
for inflicting all this pain? The only thing that could excuse
vivisection 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 \emph{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
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 medical adviser to warn us
and stimulate us. Not all living flesh is painful; nor is all nerve,
not even all sensory nerve. There’s no taint 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 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 \emph{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 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 I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted—it 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 abomination—”

“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 remorseless 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
nearly eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery and six
Kanakas. I remember 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 disagreeable 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 pugnacious 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 difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man. All 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 \emph{you} so. I didn’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 counting; 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 what he had been. When his scars were quite healed, and he was no
longer anything but painful 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 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’s 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.”

“I don’t understand,” said I; “do you mean to say—”

“It killed the Kanaka—yes. It killed several 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 wasn’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; 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, unexpected 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’s afterwards, as I observe them,
that the persuasion fades. First 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 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 something 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
this 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 magnificent 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.