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.
Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (1888)
Ants are as completely Socialistic as any community can possibly be, yet they put to death any ant which strays among them by mistake from a neighboring ant-heap. Men do not differ much from ants, as regards their instincts in this respect, wherever there is a great divergence of race, as between white men and yellow men.
Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom (1920)
The human instinct for mating and ritual is another often compared to animal life.
That some repent no one can doubt; but I am inclined to believe that most men and women take their lots as they find them, marrying as the birds do by force of nature, and going on with their mates with a general, though not perhaps an undisturbed satisfaction. . . .
Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864)
Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic ritual which is not always their real selves. And this romantic ritual is generally the ritual of not being romantic; the pretence of being much more masculine and materialistic than they are.
Chesterton, Simmons and the Social Tie (1910)
War elephants and their instincts have been pressed into laudable rhetorical service. They have a minor but irreplaceable role in the lexicon of metaphor.
The generals made use of him for his talent of railing, which, kept within government, proved frequently of great service to their cause, but, at other times, did more mischief than good; for, at the least touch of offence, and often without any at all, he would, like a wounded elephant, convert it against his leaders.
Swift, The Battle of the Books (1697)
What the condition of this country will be, when its standing army is composed of dwarfs, with here and there a wild man to throw its ranks into confusion, like the elephants employed in war in former times, I leave you to imagine, sir.
Dickens, Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood from An Ancient Gentleman (1844)
He perhaps thought, and not unreasonably, that, like the elephant in the battle, he was quite as likely to trample down his friends as his foes.
Lord Stowell, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) (on why Lord North did not want Johnson as an ally in Parliament)
