similar to ours, must experience similar sensations" and that "those sensations must be proportioned to the activity and perfection of their senses". Despite these assertions, he insisted that there exists a gap between humans and other animals. In the poem "Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne", Voltaire described a kinship between sentient beings, humans and other animals included, stating: "All sentient things, born by the same stern law, / Suffer like me, and like me also die." In Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, published in 1824, the English writer and advocate for animal rights Lewis Gompertz, argued for egalitarianism and detailed how it could be applied to nonhuman animals. He asserted that the feelings and sensations experienced by humans and other animals are highly similar, stating: "Things which affect us, generally seem to affect them in the same way; and at least the following sensations and passions are common to both, viz. hunger, desire, emulation, love of liberty, playfulness, fear, shame, anger, and many other affections". He also argued that humans and other animals share many physiological characteristics and that this implied "similitude of sensation". Gompertz was critical of the human use of nonhuman animals, arguing that they are used "without the slightest regard to their feelings, their wants, and their desires". English naturalist Charles Darwin, writing in his notebook in 1838, asserted that man thinks of himself as a masterpiece produced by a deity, but that he thought it "truer to consider him created from animals." In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that:There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties ... [t]he difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asserted that anthropocentrism was a fundamental defect of Christianity and Judaism, arguing that these religions have been a source of immense suffering for sentient beings because they separate man from the world of animals, leading to the treatment of animals as only things. Schopenhauer praised Brahmanism and Buddhism for their focus on