THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE : A PROGRAMME. 735 



is the worst is mere petulant nonsense. A worn-out voluptuary may- 

 find nothing good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, 

 who can not get the raoon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pes- 

 simistic mornings ; but there can be no doubt in the mind of any rea- 

 sonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly 

 well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their 

 way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of us had 

 been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental depres- 

 sion, for one hour in every twenty- four — a supposition which many 

 tolei'ably vigorous people know, to their cost, is not extravagant — the 

 burden of life would have been immensely increased without much 

 practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any manhood in 

 them find life quite worth living under worse conditions than these. 



There is another sufficiently obvious fact which renders the hy- 

 pothesis that the course of sentient Nature is dictated by malevolence 

 quite untenable. A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the 

 purest and the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are to all 

 appearance unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so to speak, 

 thrown into the bargain of life. To those who experience them, few 

 delights can be m.ore entrancing than such as are afforded by natural 

 beauty or by the arts, and especially by music ; but they are products 

 of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are 

 known, in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of 

 mankind. 



The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that, if Orrauzd 

 has not had his way in this world, neither has Ahriman. Pessimism is 

 as little consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism. If 

 we desire to represent the course of Nature in terms of human thought, 

 and assume that it was intended to be that which it is, we must say 

 that its governing principle is intellectual and not moral ; that it is a 

 materialized logical process accompanied by pleasures and pains, the 

 incidence of which, in the majority of cases, has not the slightest ref- 

 erence to moral desert. That the rain falls alike upon the just and 

 the unjust, and that those upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were 

 no worse than their neighbors, seem to be Oriental modes of express- 

 ing the same conclusion. 



In the strict sense of the word "Nature," it denotes the sum of the 

 phenomenal world, of that which has been, and is, and will be ; and 

 society, like art, is therefore a part of Nature. But it is convenient 

 to distinguish those parts of Nature in which man plays the part of 

 immediate cause, as something apart ; and, therefore, society, like art, 

 is usefully to be considered as distinct from Nature. It is the more 

 desirable, and even necessary, to make this distinction, since society 

 differs from Nature in having a definite moral object ; whence it 

 comes about that the course shaped by the ethical man — the member 



