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PROBABLY NO WORLD WITHOUT PAIN.

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to steal, and therefore ought not to be beat for it. You are destined to steal, are you?' answered the philosopher 'then you are no less destined to be thrashed for it.' But the necessitarian is not a fatalist; what therefore is more to the point is, that a school boy, knowing his master's opinion that no action could possibly have been otherwise under the circumstances, pleaded, for some great fault of which he had been guilty, that he could not help it. I know you could not,' replied the master, 'I do not blame you, I only pity you; and when I have given you a good flogging, the remembrance of it, and that it must always recur if the fault is committed, will enable you to help it in future.'” To be saved from punishment that is for our good is to do us a mischief, and yet that is what all are constantly praying for. Punishment that is not for our good is revenge, and to suppose that God, either in this world or in any other, revenges Himself upon His creatures, is a gross libel upon our Creator. To suppose that God can have any other object than the good of His creatures, or any attributes that are opposed to it, such as the vindication of His sovereignty, or authority, or supreme justice, is also a libel.

To the Necessitarian there is no such thing as sin and evil; only pains and pleasures. The distinction between physical and moral evil cannot be maintained. Sin, vice, and moral guilt are only evils from their tendency to produce pain and misery. Repentance and Remorse are foolish regrets over what certainly cannot now, and under the circumstances could not then, possibly have been otherwise, and are to be indulged only so far as they furnish a sufficient motive for our doing better in the future. As we get wiser and better we shall be more and more able to dispense with our nurse and schoolmaster, Pain. Probably there is no world altogether without pain, as there is no finite creature not liable to error; and pain, as far as we know, is the best, and perhaps only, corrective of that error. In a world in which there was no pain, it is

probable there would be but little pleasure; certainly in those that have been created by ourselves, to supply the supposed deficiencies of our Creator here, life would be very slow, and nothing would so certainly take us back to the savage state as the imitation on earth of what we suppose to be the order in heaven.* In an island in the Pacific a little heaven on earth was supposed to be formed by the descendants of the mutineers of the "Bounty," and Mr. Edward Maitland bas given us a description of their present condition. He says: "The principal characteristic of the islanders was their languid indifference to everything. They had never been forced to take trouble about anything, and they knew of nothing worth taking trouble about. It had cost them little toil or ingenuity to provide for all their bodily wants, and of mental wants they had absolutely none. They had never been allowed to know that there were two opinions in the world, even about religious matters. And so, without object of desire or ambition, without necessity of making a choice between Better and Worse, Right and Wrong, with no lack in the present, and secure of the future, they existed in a state of listlessness, more like vegetables than beings endowed with high faculties for happiness, for intellectual dominion, for moral excellence. And all I learnt only confirmed me in my idea of the meaning of man's history; that life is a force which has to be disciplined and educated by experience: that without temptation there can be no virtue, without pain no pleasure, without evil no good, without freedom no progress."†

* A little girl being threatened with heaven, which she supposed was to be all Sundays and collects, remonstrated and said, "Oh, but Ma, if I am very good I may have a little devil to play with sometimes; mayn't I?"

"The Passion for Intellectual Freedom," p. 30, a Lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, Jan., 1871; published by Thos. Scott, Ramsgate.

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NATURAL SELECTION.-The views contained in this Chapter were published by me some thirty years ago. Since then the works given to the world by Mr. C. Darwin and Mr. A. R. Wallace on Natural Selection, or Survival of the Fittest, have illustrated them in practice, and in this form they have obtained a wide acceptance.

It has been clearly shown that among animals, even among the least prolific, the tendency is to increase greatly beyond the means of subsistence, and that consequently, notwithstanding this great increase, the animal population of the globe is about stationary. This stationary state is effected mainly by animals living upon each other, one fitting comfortably into another-the eater by this arrangement probably having more pleasure than the eatee has pain. The consequence of this scarcity of food and of this necessity for defence is a struggle for existence, in which all the powers, bodily and mental, are exercised to their greatest stretch. Come, look alive! says Nature; and it is a struggle for dear life itself. We presume there can be no stronger motive for the exertion of all the energies. A system on which all are eating up each other, and on which the weakest always go to the wall, does not look as if it were based upon either love or justice; but it admirably promotes the largest amount of enjoyment, by developing to their fullest extent all the faculties upon whieh enjoyment depends, and keeping the world full of those only who are the most capable of enjoyment.

In this struggle, and under this pressure, Useful Varieties tend to increase, and useless ones to diminish, and thus Superior varieties ultimately extirpate and take the place of the original Species. "A wild animal," Mr. Wallace remarks, "has to search, and often to labour, for every mouthful of food-to exercise sight, hearing, and smell in seeking it, and in avoiding dangers, in procuring shelter from the inclemency of the seasons, and in providing for the subsistence

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and safety of its offspring. There is no muscle of its body that is not called into daily and hourly activity; there is no sense or faculty that is not strengthened by continual exercise. The domestic animal, on the other hand, has food provided for it, is sheltered, and often confined, to guard it against the vicissitudes of the seasons, is carefully secured from the attacks of its natural enemies, and seldom ever rears its young without human assistance. Half of its senses and faculties become quite useless, and the other half are but occasionally called into feeble exercise, while even its muscular system is only irregularly brought into action."* No doubt, consequently, as we learn from Darwin, "the brains of domestic rabbits and hares decrease in bulk, but increase in length, under domestication." The self-protecting organs, Combativeness, Destructiveness, Secretiveness, Cautiousness, which give breadth to the brain, are diminished, and the Social, which give length, are enlarged. Man has only to apply these principles to himself, for the laws in his case are equally operative. He would deteriorate if deprived of the lower motives to action, if those that peculiarly distinguish him as man were not strong and active. A prize pig is a very different animal to a pig shaking down the acorns to its little ones in its native forest; and our aldermen should take a lesson! Mr. A. R. Wallace thus summarises his facts and inferences:

"A Demonstration of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.

PROVED FACTS.

RAPID INCREASE OF ORGAN

ISMS.

TOTAL NUMBER OF INDIVI

DUALS STATIONARY.

STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. HEREDITY WITH VARIATION, or general likeness with individual differences of parents and offspring.

NECESSARY CONSEQUENCES (afterwards taken as Proved Facts).

STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE, the deaths equalling the births on the average.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, or Natural Selection; meaning simply that on the whole those die who are least fitted to maintain their existence..

*"On Natural Selection," p. 38. †"Descent of Man," vol 1, p. 146.

NATURE A UTILITARIAN.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. CHANGE OF EXTERNAL CONDITIONS, universal and unceasing. See Lyell's Principles of Geology.'

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CHANGES OF ORGANIC FORMS, to keep them in harmony with the Changed Conditions; and as the changes of conditions are permanent changes, in the sense of not reverting back to identical previous conditions, the changes of organic forms must be in the same sense permanent, and thus originate SPECIES."*

Mr. Darwin also thus summarises: "It may be metaphorically said that Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good, silently and insensibly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life." He also says, "The term general good may be defined as the means by which the greatest possible number of individuals can be reared in full vigour and health, with all their faculties perfect, under the conditions to which they are exposed."†

Surely the most bigoted Intuitionist must admit that Nature, so far at least, is a Utilitarian; but Mr. Wallace avows his conviction that the theory of Natural Selection must be modified in its application to man in accordance with the facts of Mental Philosophy. Now should Mr. Wallace ever consider the discoveries made by Gall worthy of his attention, he will probably find that it is his idea of mental philosophy that requires modifying, and not the law of Natural Selection. Man is an exception to the rest of the animal creation, inasmuch as by his faculty of reason he changes Nature and adapts it to his requirements; but an animal having no such power of adaptation, is changed by Nature. But at the expense of a little more space let us give

"Natural Selection," p. 302. † "Descent of Man," vol. 1, p. 98.

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