not even the means of knowing that He has done. 'All difficulties as to how they (the animals) are to be disposed of are so apparently and wholly founded in our ignorance that it is wonderful they should be insisted upon by any but such as are weak enough to think they are acquainted with the whole system of things.'... 'What men require is to have all difficulties cleared; and this is, or at least for anything we know to the contrary it may be, the same as requiring to comprehend the Divine nature, and the whole plan of providence from everlasting to everlasting[148].' But with human suffering the case is different, for here we are in a measure behind the scenes. We watch the process no longer from the outside but from within; and though it still remains mysterious, its mystery is full of meaning. In saying this we make two assumptions; first, that moral evil is an ultimate fact for us, in our present state of being, in the sense that it can neither be explained nor explained away: and, secondly, that character and not pleasure, being, and not feeling, or to phrase it more generally, the greatest goodness of the greatest number, is the primary end of ethics. The first of these assumptions most men are willing to admit, while the few philosophical attempts to disprove it have conspicuously failed. The second has the assent of all moralists except the hedonists, and those who without being aware of it are hedonists in disguise; the pessimism, for example, which makes so much of pain, being simply disappointed hedonism. Starting then from these premises, the problem of practical ethics is the formation of character in the face of moral evil. And in the solution of this problem pain and sorrow have a place which no other known agency conceivably could fill.