COMTE AND VIVISECTION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE ".SPECTATOR."1 •
St a,—Au opinion has been given on Vivisection to which Mr. Morison might have been expected to attend. Endeavouring toshow that direct experiment has but a limited application in biology, Comte says :—
" There can scarcely be imagined any experiments less capable of true scientific success than those of vivisection, though they have been the most frequent. Death, more or less closely connected with them, and often swift in coming, caused almost invariably in an eminently indivisible system, and the universal disturbance at once occasioned by them in the aggregate of the organic economy, make them in general especially unfit for obtaining any positive volution. I am here entirely abstracting the evident social consideration which —not only with regard to Man, but also to animals (over whom, without. doubt, we must not consider our rights as absolutely unlimited)—should make us visit with high reprobation that deplorable levity which causes youth to contract habits of cruelty as radically disastrous to its moral development, as profoundly useless, to say nomore, to its intellectual development."—" Philosophy," chap. 40.
—I am, Sir, &c., W. It. Halms.
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