ke's "little lamb" is
neutralized by the wickedness of the other hand that eggs on his
"tiger burning bright," and the course of nature will appear to be
neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral.

On the other side, though this may not be the best of all possible
worlds, to say that it is the worst is "mere petulant nonsense."
With a courage based on hours and days of personal knowledge, he
exclaims:--

There can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person
that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on fairly well
with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find their
way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and
all of us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or
of extreme mental depression, for one hour in every
twenty-four--a supposition which many tolerably vigorous
people know, to their cost, is not extravagant--the burden
of life would have been immensely increased without much
practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any
manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse
conditions than these.

Moreover, another fact utterly contradicts the hypothesis that the
sentient world is directed by malevolence:--

A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and
the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are, to all
appearance, unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so
to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who
experience them, few delights can be more entrancing than
such as are afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts, and
especially by music; but they are products of, rather than
factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known,
in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of
mankind.

To speak, then, of the course and intention of nature in terms
of human thought, we must say that its governing principle is
intellectual and not moral. It is a logical process materialized, with
pleasures and pains that fall, in most cases, without the slightest
reference to moral desert.

From the moralist's point of view the animal world, in which our own
cosmic nature has been severely trained for millions of years, is no
better than a gladiatorial show, and we cannot expect, within a few
centuries, to subdue the masterfulness of this inborn tendency, in
part necessary to our existence, to purely ethical ends. So deep
roo