No doubt there were further pleas to be put in, and we shall do well to give them their full value. There is the contention that the pleasures of life as a whole outweigh the sum of its evils. This was maintained, and we need not hesitate to say successfully maintained, by Lord Avebury, and not by him alone. Indeed Darwin had emphatically said, "According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails."[5] Then there has always been urged the undoubted fact that pain, if an evil, is yet the minister of good. Browning's optimism may have carried him too far when he laid it down that "when pain ends gain ends," but it is not to be questioned that men have profited by sufferings, and that they have had to thank their pains, if only because these have served to protect them from yet greater misfortunes. There is a true wisdom in the moral of the old fable of the blacksmith, who prayed to heaven that the fire might not burn his fingers, to discover that as {59} a result it had charred his hand to the bone. Medical science has had much to say with regard to the salutary office of pain. It has gone so far as to assert that, "the symptoms of disease are marked by purpose, and the purpose is beneficent." Nay more, "the processes of disease aim not at the destruction of life, but at the saving of it."[6] None the less, with what might seem a splendid inconsistency, the medical profession devotes itself untiringly to the alleviation of the symptoms and to the eradication of disease. Again, we may be thankful to be assured that, whatever be the case with man, the lower organisms feel pain less than he does, and much less than he is often wont to imagine that they feel it. This has been argued again and again by the veteran naturalist Wallace, whose right to speak on the subject no one is likely to dispute. In his recently published book, _The World of Life_, he has devoted a whole chapter to answering the question, "Is Nature cruel?" and it is due to him, as well as to the importance of the problem, that we should carefully note what he has said. The following quotations may be taken as sufficiently indicating his position. "The widespread idea of the cruelty of Nature is {60} almost wholly imaginary."[7] "Our whole tendency to transfer _our_ sensations of pain to the other animals is grossly misleading."[8] "No other animal _needs_ the pain-sensations that we need; it is therefore absolutely certain--on principles of evolution--that no other possesses such sensations in more than a fractional degree of ours."[9] "In the category of painless or almost painless animals, I think we may place almost all aquatic animals up to fishes, all the vast hordes of insects, probably all mollusca and worms; thus reducing the sphere of pain to a minimum throughout all the earlier geological ages, and very largely even now."[10]