hurried away to the jail, and Satan and I walked toward my home. I was
thinking to myself that I should like to see what the inside of the jail
was like; Satan overheard the thought, and the next moment we were in the
jail. We were in the torture-chamber, Satan said. The rack was there,
and the other instruments, and there was a smoky lantern or two hanging
on the walls and helping to make the place look dim and dreadful. There
were people there--and executioners--but as they took no notice of us, it
meant that we were invisible. A young man lay bound, and Satan said he
was suspected of being a heretic, and the executioners were about to
inquire into it. They asked the man to confess to the charge, and he
said he could not, for it was not true. Then they drove splinter after
splinter under his nails, and he shrieked with the pain. Satan was not
disturbed, but I could not endure it, and had to be whisked out of there.
I was faint and sick, but the fresh air revived me, and we walked toward
my home. I said it was a brutal thing.

"No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a
misuse of that word; they have not deserved it," and he went on talking
like that. "It is like your paltry race--always lying, always claiming
virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals,
which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing--that is the
monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he
does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as
wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it
--only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A
sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with
liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he
get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he
prefers the wrong. There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the Moral
Sense there couldn't be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature