Europeans are awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man. This view, with the corollary that non-human living creatures are to be regarded merely as things, is at the root of the rough and altogether reckless treatment of them, which obtains in the West.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Europeans are awakening more and more to a sense that beasts have rights, in proportion as the strange notion is being gradually overcome and outgrown, that the animal kingdom came into existence solely for the benefit and pleasure of man. This view, with the corollary that non-human living creatures are to be regarded merely as things, is at the root of the rough and altogether reckless treatment of them, which obtains in the West." in the context of "Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (1840), trans. Arthur Brodrick Bullock, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1903, Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 225" to mean that wisdom is timeless.