It may seem at first glance as if Reverence for Life were something too general and
too lifeless to provide the content of a living ethic.... Anyone who comes under
the influence of Reverence for Life will very soon be able to detect, thanks
to what that ethic demands from him, what fire glows in lifeless expression.
The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of love widened into universality....
The ethic of Reverence for Life prompts us to keep each other alert
to what troubles us and to speak and act dauntlessly together in discharging the
responsibility that we feel. It keeps us watching together for opportunities
to bring some sort of help to animals in recompense for the great misery that men
inflict upon them, and thus for a moment we escape from the incomprehensible
horror of existence.
I must interpret the life about me as I interpret
the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must
be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life,
then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine.
And not only other human life, but all kinds of life: life above mine, if there
be such life; life below mine, as I know it to exist. Ethics in our Western
world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that
is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals
also.
The deeper we look into nature, the more we realize that it
is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and
that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for
himself alone. We must realize that all life is valuable and that we are united
to all life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.
The fact that in nature one creature may cause pain to another, and
even deal with it instinctively in the most cruel way, is a harsh mystery that
weighs upon us as long as we live. One who has reached the point where he does
not suffer ever again because of this has ceased to be a man.
The
important thing is that we are part of life. We are born of other lives; we possess
the capacities to bring still other lives into existence. In the same way,
if we look into a microscope we see cell producing cell. So nature compels us
to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the
other lives which are linked to it.
Whenever I injure any kind of life
I must be quite certain that it is necessary. I must never go beyond the unavoidable,
not even in apparently insignificant things. The farmer who has mowed
down a thousand flowers in his meadow in order to feed his cows must be careful
on his way home not to strike the head off a single flower by the side of the
road in idle amusement, for he thereby infringes the law of life without being
under the pressure of necessity.
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