34 2 Weights and Measures Question Reconsidered. [June, 
great caution? Have we no climates, exhilirating, soothing, 
balmy, but where the air is laden at once with perfume and 
pestilence ? Do not our moralists universally bid us beware 
of pleasure ? Is it not, then, strange that the two opposites, 
pain and pleasure, should both be signals of danger or 
marks of what must be approached with caution ? What 
can here be the hidden purpose ? It seems to me that no 
philosophy of pain can be constituted unless it is able to 
solve this capital difficulty — a difficulty equally formidable to 
the advocate of special creation and to the evolutionist. 
But in the meantime there is nothing in the warning or 
beneficent theory of pain which can command our full 
assent. It explains certain cases in a satisfactory manner, 
but it breaks down in others. 
The last theory of pain that I shall mention is one now 
almost abandoned, though for centuries it met with general 
recognition. It regards bodily suffering not as an original 
and essential feature of the universe, but as a consequence 
of moral evil. How deeply this notion is, or at least was, 
rooted in the human mind is apparent from the history of 
language. Philologians tell us that the very word “pain ” 
means originally “ penalty” or “ punishment.” I shall per- 
haps be voted old-fashioned for even adverting to such a 
theory. But it seems to me that if pain has in it anything 
of purpose, and has been ordained by a conscious Intelli- 
gence, the phenomena of the case agree better with this view 
than with any other. 
V. THE WEIGHTS AND MEASURES QUESTION 
RECONSIDERED. 
By An Old Technologist. 
\§S^URELY all rational controversy between the old and 
the metric systems of weights and measures is by this 
time over. The last word surely has been said, and 
there remains for the upholders of our present standards 
merely a dogged determination to cling to things as they are, 
or at the best a hesitation in face of the great inconvenience 
