xix IS NATURE CRUEL? 371 



These words do not, I hope, represent the Professor's 

 view to-day ; and I believe I shall be able to show that they 

 by no means give an accurate impression of what the facts 

 really are. About the same period the late Professor 

 Huxley used terms still more erroneous and misleading. 

 He spoke of the myriads of generations of herbivorous 

 animals which " have been tormented and devoured by 

 carnivores " ; of the carnivores and herbivores alike as 

 being " subject to all the miseries incidental to old age, 

 disease, and over-multiplication " ; and of the " more or less 

 enduring suffering " which is the meed of both vanquished 

 and victor ; and he concludes that since thousands of times 

 a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs 

 and groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate 

 of Hell, the world cannot be governed by what we call 

 benevolence. 1 Such a strong opinion, from such an authority, 

 must have influenced thousands of readers ; but I shall be 

 able to show that these statements are not supported by 

 facts, and that they are, moreover, not in accordance with 

 the principles of that Darwinian evolution of which Huxley 

 was so able and staunch a defender. 



It is the influence of such statements as these, repeated 

 and even exaggerated in newspaper articles and reviews all 

 over the country, that has led so many persons to fall back 

 upon the teaching of Haeckel — that the universe had no 

 designer or creator, but has always existed ; and that the 

 life-pageant, with all its pain and horror, has been repeated 

 cycle after cycle from eternity in the past, and will be re- 

 peated in similar cycles for ever. We have here presented 

 to us one of the strangest phenomena of the human mind — 

 that numbers of intelligent men are more attracted by a belief 

 which makes the amount of pain which they think does 

 exist on the earth last for all eternity in successive worlds 

 without any permanent and good result whatever, than by 

 another belief, which admits the same amount of pain into 

 one world only, and for a limited period, while whatever 

 pain there is only exists for the grand purpose of developing 

 a race of spiritual beings, who may thereafter live without 

 physical pain — also for all eternity ! To put it shortly — 



1 The Nineteenth Century, February 1888, pp. 162-163. 



