Richard Maurice Bucke (1837 – 1902) Canadian psychiatrist.
From Bucke's 1879 book Man's Moral Nature:
From Bucke's 1879 book Man's Moral Nature:
... let us consider as well as we can the moral nature of the ancient Jews somewhat more in detail, so as to compare it with our own moral nature at the present time.
1. The family affections of this remarkable people, as far back as we can go, seem to have been well developed.
2. Their national instinct or their love for the members of their own race seems also to have been well marked from a very early period.
3. Here, however, their sympathies stop short. Love of humanity was a feeling to which they never attained. They were always ready, in every sense, to spoil the Egyptians, and not only so, but to glory in doing it. They always looked upon the non-Jews as inferior people, and despised them ; and they were doubtless right in thinking the Gentiles inferior to themselves, but they were not right in despising them.
4. They have always been a bitter people to their enemies ; no nation above the state of savagery ever made war in a fiercer or more cruel spirit. The massacres which they committed when they got the upper hand were numerous and terrible, and worse than that, they gloried in them. The Jews contrast very unfavorably with the Greeks in regard to cruelties practiced in war. Among the worst acts of the Greeks of this kind were the massacre at Mitylene, and the massacres at Korkyra. All these seem to me to have been prompted at least as much by fear as by hate, and they do not compare in savagery to any of the numerous massacres recorded in the early books of the Old Testament, and evidently exulted in by those who committed them.
5. Just what was the state of their feelings to the lower animals I do not know. It is probable that their sympathies in this direction were very limited. It is certain that they had not the same love for the non-human inhabitants of the earth as we have, or something of this feeling must have appeared in their literature.
I think that is a picture of Walt Whitman.
ReplyDeleteYou're right it was. Thanks for letting us know. I've corrected it now.
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