CHAP. XII.] CAUSES. 369 



direness of pain consists in the knowledge of it ; in that in 

 tellectual agony which recollects past moments and anti 

 cipates the future ones a condition necessarily existing in 

 a being capable of &quot; looking before and after.&quot; As, again, 

 our nature is an intellectual one, that nature enters into 

 all our feelings, and therefore we cannot argue with any 

 exactness from our feelings to those of brutes, because we 

 cannot imagine what feelings altogether devoid of intellect 

 can be. And though, of course, animals feel, they do not 

 know that they feel, nor reflect upon the sufferings they have 

 had or will have to endure. And if even the lowest races of 

 men feel less physical pain than we do, how much less may 

 be the physical suffering of even the highest brutes than that 

 of the lowest men ? Tears, cries, writhings, and other signs, 

 such as are normally in us the expressions of suffering, are 

 not necessarily such even in ourselves, as in the case of the 

 lady s finger before referred to.* They may be, and often 

 are, the mere accompaniments of reflex nervous action, and 

 may, in brutes, even when accompanying feelings, accompany 

 feelings widely different from our own. 



Who that has seen how a daddy-long-legs returns again 

 and again to a lighted candle, after first one leg and then 

 another has been burnt in the flame, can think that the 

 creature really suffers ? And if this spectacle does not con 

 sole the compassionate observer, let him reflect that if a wasp, 

 when enjoying a meal of honey, has its slender waist suddenly 

 snipped through and its whole abdomen cut away, it does not 

 allow such a trifle to interrupt for a moment its pleasurable 

 repast, but it continues to rapidly devour the savoury food, 

 which escapes as rapidly from its mutilated thorax. 



That portion of the present objection to God s goodness 

 which reposes on the supposed un worthiness of Apparently 

 certain natural actions and productions is also due phenomena. 

 in part to inverted anthropomorphism, in part to anthropo 

 morphism itself. 



See ante p. 221. 



2 B 



