[Die Tierseele]
Translation from the German by Robert Hütwohl.[1]
There is a law written on the soul of every sane person, but not everyone obeys it because the mind has not yet fully grasped it. There are certain truths which everyone knows but which are little heeded; for precisely because they are self-explanatory, one thinks about them the least. One of these things is the principle that animals should not be tortured, abused or killed unnecessarily, although this is done not only in isolated cases but on a large scale.
It may be seen daily on the highway how even grown-up boys with stones and clubs attack and kill any slowworm or lizard caught on the road, how an apparently educated man, for his amusement, sets his dog upon any innocent kitten and lets it be torn from him, or how an unreasonable wagoner whips his horse because what is being asked of him is beyond his strength, or because he does not understand his language and cannot understand what is being asked of him.
All this is comparatively insignificant compared to the cruelty to animals which is practiced on a large scale and which surpasses the cruelty of Nero and Caligula. So, for example, thousands of birds were skinned alive so that the color of the feathers used to adorn women’s hats should appear fresher, and for this reason many species of the most beautiful birds have been almost or already completely exterminated. Crayfish are cooked alive to give them a beautiful red color. Many thousands of swallows are caught annually on their migrations, for which our fir groves then perish through insect damage. In Italy, songbirds are almost the only object of hunting, since there is hardly any other “game.” Thousands perish in misery hanging in snares. Thousands of frogs have their thighs cut off and they have to die slowly and painfully. The fur of seals is said to be intact better off if it’s taken from them alive, and what more such atrocities are, not to mention the atrocities which occur in scientific animal torture and vivisection, and which can hardly be abolished by law because in the borders, how far one may go with such experiments cannot be determined by the police. The animal commits no willful cruelty. The tiger does not commit murder when it kills a human being; the animal follows the laws of its nature; the cat plays with the mouse and is not conscious of committing any cruelty, but the man who possesses a higher degree of intelligence, abuses it and then often appears as the most cruel of all animals, which is all the more contemptible since the helpless animal cannot protect itself against it and cannot defend its right to exist.
If one asks how it is that man does not fulfill his duties towards the animal world, the first question to be considered is his egoism, which is too well known to go into further detail. But then the primary cause is that we do not know the animals. We don’t even know what we really are and why we are in the world, much less in relation to the animal world. If we knew ourselves inside, then this enigma would also be clear to us. There are people who imagine that animals have no soul and that one can therefore do with them what one wants; but the soul is the seat of consciousness and feeling, and that animals have feeling and live is known to everyone. Man too, apart from his higher nature, has an animal soul, which is the seat of his animal instincts and passions. He has two souls, as Goethe says in “Faust”:
“Two souls dwell, alas! in my chest;
One wants to separate from the other.
One holds in rough lust for love
Face the world with clinging organs
The other violently rises from the dust
To the realms of high ancestors.”
It would perhaps be more correct to say: man is a soul that has a body than to say: He is a body which has a soul. It is true that he has only one soul, his “I”; but this soul has two poles, like a magnet; one pole gravitates towards the material and sensuous, the other strives upward towards divinity; one pole is the seat of the lower one’s psychic powers and egoism, the other the seat of the higher divine virtues and the sense of truth and beauty. In the lower animals, and also in countless men, the lower psychic powers are developed; in the higher ones we find an echo of the higher ones; in perfect holy people, after the passions have been overcome, only the higher ones are active. We see, then, that the difference between an animal man and the animal world is not very great. Even plants have souls; everything is soul; only the All-Soul expresses itself in different appearances. The best animal welfare would come from recognizing the position that nature has assigned us to animals.
It may therefore be worth looking at the matter from a philosophical point of view.
Many a materially-minded person imagines that he is in every respect above the animal world and is perhaps even below the animal. He thinks the whole world is there only for the satisfaction of his needs, his vanity and amusement. Even appearances contradict this. Not only do all creatures, including plants and animals, enjoy existence, but the human organism is so little different from that of some animals that certain short-sighted philosophers have had the foolish idea that man is descended from an ape and also in mental relationship is only the improved edition of a monkey. However, this was not taught by Darwin. A famous English scholar has said that he dissected hundreds of human corpses and found no soul in any of them. It seems he did not know that the soul is the spiritual part of man and the seat of his spiritual life. The soul is the mind. There are people who have a lot of sense but little soul. Not so long ago it was even dared to say that women had no soul; but I think the time is not far off when people will see that animals also have souls, yes, that every creature in nature is an individual phenomenon in the great World Soul, which is also confirmed in the Bible (John I, 3).
We, as mortal beings, are not so far removed from the animal world as some are inclined to think, and if we knew animals better we would treat them better. Some dogs are smarter than their master, some game are smarter than the hunter. The elephant surpasses man in strength, the bird in flight, the fish in swimming, the spider in spinning, the deer in jumping, the monkey in climbing. The animals can learn from us and we from the animals, loyalty from dogs, friendship from cats, obedience from horses, state economy from ants, industriousness from bees, architecture from beavers, sight from eagles, etc. Our animal nature is a compendium of all animal characteristics; we have something in common with all our lower relatives. That is why the animals can be our teachers in many respects.
Intellectually, too, the difference between the human mind and the animal mind is not overwhelmingly great. Animals think like us, only their way of thinking is not so perfect because of the difference in the organization of their thinking apparatus. They have their language to communicate with each other. Migratory birds call meetings to consider the time of their departure; the chamois post sentries to warn the flock of approaching danger; where the detective’s cunning comes to an end, the police dog’s nose is called upon. In India, elephants are employed as day laborers loading and unloading railway freight, and they are notable for their dexterity. More than once I got lost on the prairies of North America; then, if I let my horse take the reins, it would bring me home safely. How many travelers lost in the snow have been saved from death by freezing by St. Bernard dogs, how many drowning people have been pulled out of the water! A young man wanted to drown his dog. He took him into the river on a skiff, threw him in the water and hit him on the head with the oar. He fell into the water and would certainly have drowned if the dog hadn’t grabbed him and swam to the laud with him. Who proved to be more generous, the dog or the man?
Countless things could be said about the intelligence of animals, from the elephant down to the smallest insect. In India there are animal hospitals where sick animals are treated. In one such animal hospital, a dog that had broken its leg was healed by a doctor. He returned soon after his release, bringing another sick dog with him to be treated by the doctor in question. Some ducks were locked in a cage. One of them forced her head through the bars near the ceiling of the cage and could not pull it back. She would have suffocated if another duck had not slipped under her feet and supported her, whereupon the ducks gave a loud cackle, and someone came to help. Some animals are also not lacking in honor. The famous astronomer Flammarion tells of a dog who deliberately threw himself under the wheels of a bus and let himself be run over. He committed suicide out of desperation because he had been unjustly punished. I myself once saw a cat, apparently for similar reasons, commit suicide by throwing itself through the open window into the river and drowning.
I could adduce, from my own experience, a multitude of facts proving the intelligence of animals, and bearing witness to their emotional or mental life; I just want to mention a few of them:
When I drove from Madras to Naples, we had a monkey and a female monkey on board. The monkey fell ill, the monkey looked after him and tried to cheer him up. When the monkey died, the monkey refused food, looked like a picture of despair and died after a few days.
Cases of dogs lying down on their master’s grave and refusing food are frequently mentioned.
I had a tame raven that was a model of intelligence. One day I brought home a young jackdaw [a small gray-headed crow] and wanted to feed it. But I couldn’t get her to open her beak. My raven stood by and watched me, and it seemed like he wanted to laugh at me. When I stepped aside after unsuccessful attempts, the raven took the food and fed the jackdaw, which was willing to be fed by him.
I had three garden spiders in my room, each with its web, which came out at my call and took food from me.
It is well known that if you block the entrance to your bed for bugs by placing the bed feet in jars of water, they will then crawl along the wall to the ceiling and drop down from there.
A swallow caught itself in a noose and caught one foot in it. At her call a multitude of swallows came and took turns pecking at the string until it was gnawed through and the mate was free.
Such facts prove that animals have minds and souls, and yet they are treated as if they were unfeeling logs. Although the Bible says: “Thou shalt not kill,” and nothing is said about the exception of animals, devout Christians practice the killing of animals on a large scale, and even the useless death penalty for humans has not yet been abolished everywhere “Things are different among the Buddhists, and the Indians also regard killing a cow as a crime against religion. Perhaps everyone has heard of the “termites” or “white ants” which, when they invade a house, are capable of eating through all the roof beams in one night, so that the house collapses. Anything that is not made of metal is not safe from them, which is why people travel in India with tin suitcases. The only way to get rid of them is that their nest be found and their queen killed. When I was in Adyar (Madras) we were attacked by them. My friend Ananda managed to find the nest, but being a Buddhist, he did not kill the queen, but carried her carefully and lovingly into the neighbor’s field. This was in any case an exaggerated conscientiousness.
During my stay in Ceylon, a herd of monkeys attacked a house occupied by natives and made a lot of mischief. The natives managed to catch quite a number of monkeys; but they did not kill them, rather took them to a desert island, where they abandoned them to their fate. Something similar happened recently in Constantinople in relation to the dogs and proves that religious teachings can also be misunderstood in the Orient; for he who enables a creature to die is as guilty as he who kills it with his own hands. Not the butchers, but the meat eaters are to blame for the killing of the animals.
Would I be allowed? If I were to delve deeper into oriental philosophy today and explain the mysteries of it in relation to spiritual processes, changes of soul, etc., I could probably mention many more interesting things; but I must confine myself to remark only the following:
Just as there are people in Europe who misunderstand their religious teachings, so is the case in India. Many ignorant people think that the soul of a deceased person can be embodied in animals, and whoever then kills such an animal harms the person embodied in it. During my stay in India, a traveling Englishman stayed overnight in a village. The windows were open; for there are no well-closed windows there. Then one of the common dogs or “vampires,” which look like giant bats, flew into the room and sat on the sleeping man’s shoulder. He woke up, took a stick, killed the bat and threw it out of the window, whereupon he continued to sleep.
In the morning he woke up to a loud scream. He got up and found that a crowd was gathering in front of the house, making a lot of noise and taking up a threatening position. One old woman in particular stood out and stretched out her fists threateningly at the Englishman. Since he didn’t understand the language, he couldn’t explain the cause of the noise and asked his native servant what the people wanted. He then learned that the old woman claimed that her dead husband had been embodied in the bat, and since the Englishman had killed the bat, he had also killed her husband.
The crowd grew more and more excited, and the Englishman grew concerned. Then the servant asked him for ten rupees, saying that he would put the matter in order with it; for he sees a Brahmin among them who will be open to discussion.
When the money had been handed over to the brahmin by the servant, he turned to the old woman and said:
“It is true, my dear wife, that your late husband inhabited the body of the bat, and that the stranger drove him out; but this was at the wish of the blessed himself; for he no longer wanted to live in the ugly body of a bat, and since a magnificent calf was born in my cowshed last night, he took possession of it. I’ll sell you the calf; then you will have your blessed again with you.” This happened, the brahmin got his money, the woman her blessed, and all was well again.
It would be very wrong to imagine that this is the Indian doctrine of reincarnation or reincarnation. There is no question of migration of the human ego into an animal body, but only of a constant ascent from the lower to the higher, of higher and higher stages of existence on the path of evolution, and the truth of this teaching is self-evident as soon as it is correctly understood. This is not the time to dwell on that teaching.
In short, the following can be said about it:
Everyone sees that in the world forms are constantly passing away and new forms arising, inheriting and embodying the qualities of the preceding ones. There is a constant descent of the spiritual and ascent of the material, that is, an evolution and refinement of the forms. The Life-wave in the universe brings about conditions through distribution, which are divided into class, species and group characteristics, until finally individual self-awareness awakens in man. Every people has its national character, every class of animal its special qualities, and there are only too many herd people who do not yet have a special character.
According to the teachings of the Indian sages, everything in the world came into being from just one spirit; the one life in nature reveals itself in various forms according to the degree of its development. From the mineral kingdom springs the plant kingdom, from this the animal kingdom, the highest stage of development of which is the human organism, and from humanity the world of angels or gods is born. The whole of nature strives towards incarnation and through this towards divinity. What God is to humans, man is to animals. He should be a loving caretaker to them and not a malicious devil.
In the Bhagavad Gītā of the Indians it is written; “Whoever sees the divine in all things is the true seer.” That is why the believers also strive to worship God in all his creatures, in all the one deity and not to offend them in any way; they even look to the plants respect the lives of animals, and there are people who seek to be careful not to kill an animal unwittingly, and who wear a veil over their mouths so as not to inhale an insect.
As far as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is concerned, I believe that mankind is far from being ready to fully comply with such laws. We have not yet reached the ideal conditions pictured in the religious scriptures; for this does not depend on our whim, but on the progress of mankind as a whole. But we should strive to come closer to these ideals and try to realize them more and more. No one is alone in the world. The progress of the individual depends on the development of the whole, and this depends on the progress of the individual. It is difficult to fight against natural necessities. But there will come a time when much of what we now consider necessary will seem useless or even harmful. Animal abuse is not a necessity. Human brutality is a disease which can only be cured once and for all if its cause is eliminated. That cause is ignorance, and the best protection of animals is the enlightenment and ennobling of the human race, a work which should be undertaken not only by the clergy and teachers, but by everyone who is able. But this involves something more than physical science and something better than materialism, monism or Haeckel’s speculations. The science of matter cannot go beyond the limits of matter, and in order to know the spirit at work in the universe one must have spirit oneself, for only like can comprehend like. The solution to the riddle of the world can only be found by means of true religious feeling, and then everyone ultimately finds it within himself.
Note:
[1] The Animal-soul. [Die Tierseele. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Neue Lotusblüten 5, no. 11-12 (November-December 1912), 342-359] Nach einem im Meraner Tierschutzverein gehaltenen Vortrage. {Based on a lecture given in the Merano Animal Welfare Association.}{This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}