"Герберт Уэллс. Dr. Moreau" - читать интересную книгу автора

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 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 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