ovement is only secured at the cost of suffering, indicates a kind
of callousness on the part of an intelligent Being supposed to be
omnipotent, I confess that such does appear to me a legitimate
conclusion--subject, however, to the reservation that higher knowledge
might displace it. For, as far as matters are now actually presented to
the unbiased contemplation of a human mind, this provisional inference
appears to me unavoidable--namely, that if the world of sentient life be
due to an Omnipotent Designer, the aim or motive of the design must have
been that of securing a continuous advance of animal improvement,
without any regard at all to animal suffering. For I own it does not
seem to me compatible with a fair and honest exercise of our reason to
set the sum of animal happiness over against the sum of animal misery,
and then to allege that, in so far as the former tends to balance--or to
over-balance--the latter, thus far is the moral character of the design
as a whole vindicated. Even if it could be shown that the sum of
happiness in the brute creation considerably preponderates over that of
unhappiness--which is the customary argument of theistic apologists,--we
should still remain without evidence as to this state of matters having
formed any essential part of the design. On the other hand, we should
still be in possession of seemingly good evidence to the contrary. For
it is clearly a condition to progress by survival of the fittest, that
as soon as organisms become sentient selection must be exercised with
reference to sentiency; and this means that, if further progress is to
take place, states of sentiency _must_ become so organized with
reference to habitual experience of the race, that pleasures and pains
shall answer respectively to states of agreement and disagreement with
the sentient creature's environment. Those animals which found pleasure
in what was deleterious to life would not survive, while those which
found pleasure in what was beneficial to life would survive; and so
eventually, in every species of animal, states of sentiency as agreeable
or disagreeable must approximately correspond with what is good for the
species or bad for the species. Indeed, we may legitimately surmise that
the reason why sentiency (and, _a fortiori_, conscious volition) has
ever appeared upon the scene at all, has been because it
furnishes--through this continuously selected adjustment of states of
sentiency to states of