400 THE WORLD OF LIFE 



are not interested in any philosophical justification of this natural 

 or unnatural method until we are sure that it is a fact." 



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 devotired by carnivores " ; of the carnivores 

 and herbivores alike as being " subject to all the miseries inci- 

 dental 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 thou- 

 sands of times a minute, were our ears shai'p 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 w^hat we 

 call benevolence.-^ Such a strong opinion, from such an author- 

 ity, 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 wdth the prin- 

 ciples 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 repeated 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 



iThe Nineteenth Century, February 1888, pp. 162-163. 



