WHAT TO BELIEVE IN SCIENCE : TELEOLOGY OE EVOLUTION. 19 
injuries would meet us at every step and in every motion, and, 
whether felt or not, would be destructive to life. To suppose 
that we are to move and act, without experience of resistance 
and of pain, is to suppose not only that man’s nature is changed, 
but the whole of exterior nature also. There must he nothing 
to bruise the body or hurt the eye, nothing noxious to be drawn 
in with the breath : in shol't, it is to imagine altogether another 
state of existence, and the philosopher would be mortified were 
we to put this interpretation on his meaning. Pain is the 
necessary contrast to pleasure : it ushers us into existence or 
consciousness ; it alone is capable of exciting the organs into 
activity ; it is the companion and the guardian of human life.”* 
To argue, therefore, that man in Paradise was free from 
pain is to argue that he was without the necessary companion 
and guardian of life, without that which alone is capable of 
exciting his organs into activity ; that he was liable at every 
step and in every motion to destructive injuries ; and that he 
was rewarded for sinning by then first becoming capable of 
pleasure. Or you can avoid these conclusions and still cling to 
the old opinion that physical pain and death were introduced 
into the world through man’s transgression, by maintaining 
that until that event the lion roared as gently as any sucking 
dove, and that beak and claw and talon and envenomed fang 
were only prospective contrivances, the ingenious apparatus of 
punishment beneficently designed before any fault had been 
committed. What tenderness and benevolent wisdom we should 
recognise in a human parent who, as soon as his child was born 
or even sooner, provided a large series of rods to chastise its 
anticipated offences ! 
We turn, in conclusion, to a class of cases which appeal to 
sentiment more forcibly than any others. Such an appeal 
has no proper cogency in rigid argument, but the use of it has 
a definite value and adequate justification when the minds of 
men have been previously closed to the reception of purely 
logical inference by sentimental objections. There is a 
strong popular bias in favour of the old hypothesis of distinct 
creation. That hypothesis conceives of each living creature as 
having been specially designed and constructed for its place in 
the world and for certain methods of operation, as a watch, a 
steam-engine, a microscope, a guillotine, might be designed 
and constructed by man. With this hypothesis before our 
minds, let us take the case of the Hermit-crab. This animal 
encases its soft defenceless body in the unoccupied shell of a 
mollusk. Its abdomen is furnished with hooked appendages 
to enable it to attach itself to this tenement. Here, then, we 
Sir Charles Bell, Bridgewater Treatise, <l On the Hand,” p, 190. 
