"But sympathy!" it may be said—"You have left sympathy out of the reckoning. Unless we are not only 'individuals' but iron-clad egotists, we suffer with others more keenly, sometimes, than in our own persons." Sympathy, no doubt, is, like the summer sun and the frost of winter, a fact of common experience causing us alternate joy and pain; but it means no sort of breach in the wall of "individuation." Our nearest and dearest are simply factors in our environment, most influential factors, but as external to us as the trees or the stars. We cannot, in any real sense, draw away their pains and add them to our own, any more than they, in their turn, can relieve us of our toothache or our sciatica. They are the points, doubtless, at which our environment touches us most closely, but neither incantation nor Act of Parliament, neither priest nor registrar, can make even man and wife really "one flesh." It was necessary for the conservation of the species that a strict limit should be set to the operation of sympathy. Had that emotion been able to pierce the shell of individuality, so that one being could actually add the sufferings of another, or of many others, to his own, life would long ago have come to an end. As it is, sympathy implies an imaginative extension of individuality, which is of enormous social value. But we remain, none the less, isolated each in his own universe, and our fellow-men and women are but shapes in the panorama, the strange, fantastic dream, which the Veiled Showman unrolls before us.
In these post-Darwinian days, moreover, we are inclined to give way to certain morbid and sentimental exaggerations of sympathy, which do some injustice to the great Artificer whom we are for the moment assuming to be responsible for sentient life. Many of us are much concerned about "nature, red in tooth and claw." It is a sort of nightmare to us to think of the tremendous fecundity of swamp and jungle, warren and pond, and of the ruthless struggle for existence which has made earth, air, and sea one mighty battle-ground. In this we are again letting the fallacy of number take hold of us. There can be no aggregate of suffering among lower, any more than among higher, organisms; and the amount of pain which individual animals have to endure—even animals of those species which we can suppose to possess a certain keenness of sensibility—is probably, in the vast majority of cases, very trifling. Half the anguish of humanity proceeds from the power of looking before and after. The animal, though he may suffer from fear of imminent, visible danger, cannot know the torture of long-drawn apprehension. For most of his life he is probably aware of a vague well-being; then of a longer or shorter—often a very short—spell of vague ill-being; and so, the end. Nor is it possible to doubt that the experience of some animals includes a great deal of positive rapture. If the lark be not really the soul of joy, he is the greatest hypocrite under the sun. Many insects seem to be pin-points of vibrant vitality which we can scarcely believe to be unaccompanied by pleasurable sensation. The mosquito which I squash on the back of my hand, and which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a short life but doubtless a merry one. The moths which, in a tropic night, lie in calcined heaps around the lamp, have probably perished in pursuit of some ecstatic illusion. It does not seem, on the whole, that we need expend much pity on the brute creation, or make its destinies a reproach to the great Artificer. Which is not to say, of course, that we ought not to detest and try with all our might to abolish the cruelties of labor, commerce, sport and war.
Again, as to the great calamities—the earthquakes, shipwrecks, railway accidents, even the wars—which are often made a leading count in the arraignment of the Author of Sentience, we must not let ourselves be deceived by the fallacy of number. Their spectacular, dramatic aspect naturally attracts attention; but the death-roll of a great shipwreck is in fact scarcely more terrible than the daily bills of mortality of a great city. It is true that a violent death, overtaking a healthy man, is apt to involve moments, perhaps hours, of acute distress which he might have escaped had he died of gradual decay or of ordinary well-tended disease; and a very short space of the agony sometimes attendant upon (say) a railway accident, probably represents itself to the sufferer as an eternity. But there is also another side to the matter. Instantaneous death in a great catastrophe must be reckoned as mere euthanasia; and even short of this, the attendant excitement has often the effect of an anodyne. In the upshot, no doubt, such occurrences are rightly called disasters, since their tendency is to cause needlessly painful death, under circumstances, which in the main, enhance its terrors; but the sufferings of the victims cannot be added together because they occur within a limited area, any more than if they had been spread over an indefinite tract of space. As for war, it increases the liability of every individual who comes within its wide-flung net to intense bodily and mental suffering, and to premature and painful death. Moreover, it destroys social values which can be added up. In this respect it leaves the world face to face with an appalling deficit. But we must not let it weigh upon us too heavily, or make it too great a reproach to the Artificer of human destiny. For the soldier, like every other sentient organism, is immured in his own universe, and his individual debit-and-credit account with the Power which placed him there would be no whit different if he were indeed the only real existence, and the world around him were naught but a dance of shadows.
If there were a country of a hundred million people, in which every citizen was born to an allowance of five pounds, which in all his life he could not possibly increase, or invest in joint-stock enterprises, though he might leave some of it unexpended—we should not, in spite of the £500,000,000 of its capital, call that a wealthy country. Its effective wealth would be precisely a five-pound note. Similarly, given a world in which every one is born with a limited capacity of sentience, inalienable, incommunicable, unique, we should do wrong to call that world a multi-millionaire in misery, even if it could be proved that in each individual account the balance of sensation was on the wrong side of the ledger. It is true that if, in one man's account, the balance were largely to the bad, he would be entitled to reproach the Veiled Banker, even though five hundred or five thousand of his fellows declared themselves satisfied with the result of their audit. But if the Banker, in opening business, had good reason to think that, in the long run, the contents would largely outvote the non-contents, we could scarcely blame him for going ahead. And what if, for contents and malcontents alike, he had an uncovenanted bonus up his sleeve?
In this disquisition, with its shifting personifications, its Artificer, Author, Banker and the like, we may seem to have wandered far away from Mr. Wells and his Invisible King; but I hope the reader has not wholly lost the clue. Let us recapitulate. Starting from the idea that its total renunciation of metaphysics, its incuriousness as to causation, was a weakness in Mr. Wells's system, inasmuch as an eager curiosity as to these matters is an inseparable part of our intellectual outfit, we set about enquiring whether it might not be possible to abandon the notions of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence, and yet to conceive a doctrine of origins into which a well-willing God should enter, not, like the Invisible King, as a sort of remedial afterthought, but as a prime mover in this baffling business of life. We put forward two hypotheses, each of which seemed more thinkable, less in the air, so to speak, than Mr. Wells's scheme of things. We imagined a wholly callous, unpitying Power, wantonly setting up combinations in matter which it knew would work out in cruelty and misery, and another co-ordinate though not quite equal Power interfering from the first to introduce into the combinations of the Elder Deity a slow but sure bias towards the good. Then we proposed an alternative hypothesis, logically simpler, though more difficult from the moral point of view. We conceived at the source of organic life an intelligent and well-willing Power constrained, by some necessity "behind the veil," to carry out his purposes through the sluggish, refractory, hampering medium of matter. Supposing this Power free to act or to refrain from acting, we asked whether he could take the affirmative course—choose the "Everlasting Yea" as Carlyle would phrase it—without forfeiting our esteem and disqualifying for the post of Invisible King in the Wellsian sense of the term. In a tentative way, not exempt, perhaps, from a touch of special pleading, we advanced certain considerations which seemed to suggest that his decision to kindle the torch of life might, after all, be justified. Our provisional conclusion was that though, as at present advised, we might not quite see our way to hail him as a beneficent Invisible King, yet we need not go to the opposite extreme of writing him down a mere Ogre God, indifferent to the vast and purposeless process of groaning and travail, begetting and devouring, which he had wantonly initiated. That is the point at which we have now arrived.
I hope it need not be said I do not attribute any substantive value to the hypothetical myths here put forward and discussed—that I do not accept either of them, or propose that anyone else should accept it, as a probable adumbration of what actually occurred "in the beginning"—a first chapter in a new Book of Genesis. My purpose was simply, since myth-making was the order of the day, to hint a criticism of Mr. Wells's myth, by placing beside it one or two other fantasies, perhaps as plausible as his, which had the advantage of not entirely eluding the question of origins. I submit, with great respect, that my Artificer comes a little less out of the blue than his Invisible King—that is all I claim for him.
But here Mr. Wells puts in a protest, not without indignation. Myth-making, he declares, is not the order of the day. Had he wanted to indulge in myth-making, he could easily have found some metaphysical affiliation for his Invisible King. What he has done is to record a profound spiritual experience, common to himself and many other good men and true, which has culminated in the recognition of an actual Power, objectively extant in the world, to which he has felt it a sacred duty to bear witness. Very good; so be it; let us now look more in detail into the gospel according to Wells.