The Island of Doctor Moreau

I have recently finished reading The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G.Wells, an imaginative, premonitory, wild and full of repulsive details novel about the inmoral human experiments which go further than science responding only to the dark desires of the irrationalism a man can achieve (may I see liberate the Beast we have inside?).

In Guttenberg project it is possible to read for free this late XIX century novel.

Herein I extract two passages of the book which I find very interesting these days, for writing my PhD thesis in Physics is a bitter blend of pain and encourage in direct proportion:

""The capacity for pain is not needed in the muscle, and it is not placed there,—is but little needed in the  skin, and only here and there over the thigh is a spot capable of feeling pain. Pain is simply our intrinsic medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us. Not all living flesh is painful; nor is all nerve, not even all sensory nerve. [...] Plants do not feel pain, nor the lower animals; it's possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish do not feel pain at all. Then with men, the more intelligent they become, the more intelligently they will see after their own welfare, and the less they will need the goad to keep them out of danger. I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.[...]

“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!""

""My days I devote to reading and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is —though I do not know how there is or why there is— a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. 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.""

H.G.Wells sobre 1916 (Immediate image source: Gutenberg.org)