"No other animal needs the pain-sensations that we need; it is therefore absolutely certain—on principles of evolution—that no other possesses such sensations in more than a fractional degree of ours."[[9]]
"In the category of painless or almost painless animals, I think we may place almost all aquatic animals up to fishes, all the vast hordes of insects, probably all mollusca and worms; thus reducing the sphere of pain to a minimum throughout all the earlier geological ages, and very largely even now."[[10]]
"The purpose and use of all parasitic diseases is to seize upon the less adapted and less healthy individuals—those which are slowly dying and no longer of value in the preservation of the species, and therefore to a certain extent injurious to the race by requiring food and occupying space needed by the more fit."[[11]]
Speaking of "the vicious-looking teeth and claws of the cat tribe, the hooked beak and prehensile talons of birds of prey, the poison fangs of serpents, the stings of wasps and many others," Dr. Wallace writes; "The idea that all these weapons exist for the purpose of shedding blood or giving pain is wholly illusory. As a matter of fact, their effect is wholly beneficent even to the sufferers, inasmuch as they tend to the diminution of pain. Their actual purpose is always to prevent the escape of captured food—of a wounded animal, which would then, indeed, suffer useless pain, since it would certainly very soon be captured again and be devoured." "All conclusions derived from the house-fed cat and mouse are fallacious."[[12]] Finally he concludes by inveighing against "the ludicrously exaggerated view adopted by men of such eminence and usually of such calm judgment as Huxley—a view almost as far removed from fact or science as the purely imaginary and humanitarian dogma of the poet:
'The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.'
Whatever the giant may feel, if the theory of Evolution is true, the 'poor beetle' certainly feels an almost irreducible minimum of pain, probably none at all."[[13]]
We may add to all these considerations the further fact that we are constantly finding out that things have their use which had been too hastily assumed to be mere blots upon Nature. The desert and the volcano, for instance, have often been regarded in that light. But we have lately been assured that both are needed for the supply of atmospheric dust, which is a necessary condition of the rain-fall; so that they are really essential to life upon the planet. Beyond question, then, there is very much to be said in mitigation of the terrible difficulty occasioned by what appear to be the havoc and the prodigality of Nature.
And yet—when all has been said—a residuum does remain of inexplicable misery and distress, and there are times when we are all of us constrained to cry out with Darwin that it is "too much," and to ask whether there is not some further clue to the mystery. And then it may well be that there comes to our mind an answer that has been given from the very first moment at which human beings have thought at all. It is an answer which has seemed inevitable alike to the simplest and the wisest.
Carlyle once told of two Scottish peasants who found themselves for the first time at Ailsa Crag. They stared in astonishment at the great sea-precipices. At last one said to the other: "Eh, Jock, Nature's deevilish!"[[14]] That was the view taken by the primitive races of the world, as their worships and incantations bore witness. It is a view which cannot be lightly dismissed as having nothing at all in its support. We may minimise the evil that is at work around and within us as we will, but, when we have done our utmost, we shall be unlike the vast majority of our race if we are not compelled to admit that there is that in the world which it is quite impossible to ascribe to the immediate action of an entirely good and beneficent God.