The Island of Dr. Moreau

by H.G. Wells

‘Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? ‘Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? ‘Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men? ‘Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men? ‘Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’

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.

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?’

Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us. All living flesh is not painful, nor is all nerve, nor even all sensory nerve. There’s no taint of pain, real pain, in the sensations of the optic nerve.

It may be I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you – for I have sought his laws, in my way, all my life, while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies.

*

Before they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle,2 one long dread of Moreau – and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

‘This silly ass of a world,’ he said. ‘What a muddle it all is! I haven’t had any life. I wonder when it’s going to begin.

There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.