The fish, wild beasts, and all the winged fowl,And therefore, as brutes can extend no act of justice to us, so neither can we commit any act of injustice against them. Which argument they who reject have left us no benefit of life, nor any the smallest entrance for justice into the world.
To prey upon their kinds without control,
For among them no law nor justice reigns;
Only by justice man from man abstains.
1
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SOCLARUS. You seem to me to be very much in the
right, for the Stoics and Peripatetics are led to affirm the
contrary upon this supposition, that justice could have no
certain original, but would be altogether incomprehensible and inexistent if all brute creatures should partake
[p. 168]
of reason. For either of necessity we must do a very
great piece of injustice when we devour and feed upon
them; or if we forbear the use of them, it will be impossible for us to live, or rather we shall in some measure
live the lives of beasts, rejecting the use of brute creatures.
I pass by those innumerable myriads of nomades and
Troglodytes that know no other food but flesh. But as
for us that seem to live lovingly and in friendship together, what necessity would there be of laboring on the
earth, toiling upon the sea, or mining in the mountains,
what ornament would there be in our life, if it were so
that we must be bound to live, as it would then become
us, not only without injury but rather with all civility and
humanity toward all the sorts of beasts, as being our fellow
rational creatures? We have no cure, no remedy for an
unquestionable necessity that deprives us either of life or
justice, unless we observe that ancient bound and dispensation which, according to Hesiod, distinguishing natures and
separating every kind by themselves, commands
1 Hesiod, Works and Days, 275.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 5.
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