distant regions?” Johnson. “That, Sir, is not to the present purpose: we are talking of sense. A fighting cock has a nobleness of resolution.”
Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
’Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish never surrenders.
Melville, Mardi (1849)
No doubt behind these legal rights is the fighting will of the subject to maintain them, and the spread of his emotions to the general rules by which they are maintained; but that does not seem to me the same thing as the supposed a priori discernment of a duty or the assertion of a preexisting right. A dog will fight for his bone.
Holmes, Jr., Natural Law (1918)
4. Prospects for improvement. Humans may have dispositions that are hard to change; such immutability is clearer in the case of animals, and may be illustrated accordingly.
I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man’s real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, “A cur’s tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years’ labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form.”
Thoreau, Walden (1854)
If the typical criminal is a degenerate, bound to swindle or to murder by as deep seated an organic necessity as that which makes the rattlesnake bite, it is idle to talk of deterring him by the classical method of imprisonment. He must be got rid of; he cannot be improved, or frightened out of his structural reaction.
Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law (1897)
A related application is the analogy to what is inevitable in animals to describe what is inevitable in humans, or some particular type of them.
[T]he cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.
Chesterton, Thomas Carlyle (1903)
But what is the anarchistic ex-professor’s own theory? – for a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas.
Mencken, Criticism of Criticism of Criticism (1919)
Animals capable of training are brought along by methods cruder than education, the lore of which can provide matter for and effective and humiliating comparisons.
Foolish fellows! (said Dr. Johnson), don’t they see that they are as much dependent upon the Peers one way as the other. The Peers have but to oppose a candidate to ensure him success. It is said the only way to make a pig go forward, is to pull him back by the tail. These people must be treated like pigs.
Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!”
The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
In short, all experience shows that almost all men require at times both the spur of hope and the bridle of fear, and that religious hope and fear are an effective spur and bridle, though some people are too hard-mouthed and thick-skinned to care much for either, and though others will now and then take the bit in their teeth and rush where passion carries them, notwithstanding both.
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)
5. Instinctive life. We have seen that humans may be compared to animals on the basis of traits that we imagine they share – courage, ignorance, etc. We turn now to a more specific set of comparisons: those involving instinctive behavior. Sometimes such comparisons are made to humans generally.
[L]et them have what instructions you will, and ever so learned lectures of breeding daily inculcated into them, that which will most influence their carriage, will be the company they converse with, and the fashion of those about them. Children (nay, and men too) do most by example. We are all a sort of chameleons, that still take a tincture from things near us. . . .
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
If we were reasoning, farsighted people, four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief, and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial reconstructive results. The reason we do not do this is because we work like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter at all.
Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
In fact, men think in packs as jackals hunt.
St. John, note on Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding (1854)
Or the point may be more particular – a claim not about humans in general, but about certain of them, or a distinct pattern of human behavior; and these subjects may in turn be compared not to animals generally, but to animals in certain circumstances and the instincts they display.
Like the tiger, that seldom desists from pursuing man after having once preyed upon human flesh, the reader who has once gratified his appetite with calumny makes ever after the most agreeable feast upon murdered reputations!
Goldsmith, The Traveler (dedication) (1764)
That the number of authors is disproportionate to the maintenance, which the public seems willing to assign them; that there is neither praise nor meat for all who write, is apparent from this, that, like wolves in long winters, they are forced to prey on one another.
Johnson, A Project for the Employment of Authors (1756)
In the House of Commons his credit was low and my reputation very high. You know the nature of that assembly: they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shews them game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged.
Bolingbroke, letter to William Windham (1717)
Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass.
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Cf.:
I’m capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation – but steady every-day goodness is beyond me. I must be a moral kangaroo!
Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866)
The instinct for vengeance and self-protection is a common subject for comparisons of this kind.
They hold together like bees; offend one, and all will revenge his quarrel.
Kingsley, Westward Ho! (1855)
Vengeance imports a feeling of blame, and an opinion, however distorted by passion, that a wrong has been done. It can hardly go very far beyond the case of a harm intentionally inflicted: even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
distant regions?” Johnson. “That, Sir, is not to the present purpose: we are talking of sense. A fighting cock has a nobleness of resolution.”
