Alfred Russel Wallace 



suffering in animals. He noticed that all good men and 

 women rightly shrank from giving pain to them, and he set 

 himself to prove that the capacity for pain decreased as we 

 descended the scale of life, and that poets and others were 

 mistaken when they imputed acute suffering to the lower 

 creation, because of the very restricted response of their 

 nervous system. Even in the case of the human infant, he 

 concluded that only very slight sensations are at first re- 

 quired, and that such only are therefore developed. The 

 sensation of pain does not, probably, reach its maximum 

 till the whole organism is fully developed in the adult in- 

 dividual. " This," he added, with that characteristic touch 

 which made him kin to all oppressed people, '^ is rather 

 comforting in view of the sufferings of so many infants 

 needlessly sacrificed through the terrible defects of our 

 vicious social system." 



To Wallace pain was the birth-cry of a soul's advance 

 — the stamp of rank in nature is capacity for pain. Pain, 

 he held, was always strictly subordinated to the law of 

 utility, and was never developed beyond what was actually 

 needed for the protection and advance of life. This brings 

 the sensitive soul immense relief. Our susceptibility to 

 the higher agonies is a condition of our advance in life's 

 pageant. 



Take another instance. Amongst his numerous corre- 

 spondents there were not a few who decided not to take 

 life, for food, or science, or in war. One young man who 

 went out with the assistance of Wallace to Trinidad and 

 Brazil to become a naturalist, and to whom he wrote 

 many letters^ of direction and encouragement, gave up 

 the work of collecting — to Wallace's sincere disappoint- 

 ment — and came home because he felt that it was wrong 

 to take the lives of such wondrous and beautiful birds and 



1 See pp. 227, 234. 

 244 



