hich sometimes warps our
judgment as to the responsibility of the Power which invented life.

We are all apt to speak and think as though sentience were an article
capable of accumulation, like money or merchandise, in enormous
aggregates--as though pleasure, and more particularly pain, were
subject to the ordinary rules of arithmetic, so that minor quantities,
added together, might mount up to an indefinitely gigantic total.
Poets and philosophers, time out of mind, have been heartbroken over
the enormous mass of evil in the world, and have spoken as though
animated nature were one great organism, with a brain in which every
pang that afflicted each one of its innumerable members was piled up
into a huge, pyramidal agony. But this is obviously not so. That very
"individuation" which to some philosophies is the primal curse--the
condition by all means to be annulled and shaken off[2]--forbids the
adding up of units of sentience. If "individuation" is the source of
human misery (which seems a rather meaningless proposition) it is
beyond all doubt its boundary and limit. We are each of us his own
universe. With each of us the universe is born afresh; with each of us
it dies--assuming, that is to say, that consciousness is extinguished
at death. There never has been and never can be in the world more
suffering than a single organism can sustain--which is another way of
saying that nothing can hurt us more than we can be hurt. Is this an
optimistic statement? Far from it. The individual is capable of great
extremities of suffering; and though not all men, or even most, are
put to the utmost test in this respect, there are certainly cases not
a few in which a man may well curse the day he was born, and see in
the universe that was born with him nothing but an instrument of
torture. But such an one must speak for himself. It is evident that,
take them all round, men accept life as no such evil gift. It cannot
even be said that, in handing it on to others, they are driven by a
fatal instinct which they know in their hearts to be cruel, and would
resist if they could. The vast majority have been, and still are,
entirely light-hearted about the matter, thus giving the best possible
proof that they cherish no grudge against the source of being, but
find it, on the balance, acceptable enough. If it be said that this is
due to stupidity, then stupidity is one of the factors in the case
which the great Artificer must be supposed to