The human mind may very probably be unable fully to answer this question. It can only hope truthfully to answer it even in a measure by studying the relevant facts, the actual effects and natural tendencies of suffering; general speculations are not likely to profit it much. Now, among the relevant facts, one of the most manifest is that pain serves to warn animals against what would injure or destroy them. It has a preservative use. Were animals unsusceptible of pain, they would be in continual peril. Bayle has ingeniously devised some hypotheses with a view to show that pain might have safely been dispensed with in the animal constitution, but they are obviously insufficient. It would be rash to affirm that pain is indispensable as a warning against danger, but certainly no one has shown how it could be dispensed with, or even plausibly imagined how it might be dispensed with. For anything we can see or even conceive, animal organisms could only be preserved in a world like ours by being endowed with a susceptibility to pain. For anything we know or can even imagine, the demand that there should be no pain is implicitly a demand that there should be no animal life and no world like the earth;--a most foolish and presumptuous demand. But however this may be, pain has, as a fact, plain reference to the prevention of physical injury. "Painful sensations," says Professor Le Conte, "are only watchful vedettes upon the outposts of our organism to warn us of approaching danger. Without these, the citadel of our life would be quickly surprised and taken." Now, to the whole extent that what has just been said is true, pain is not evil but good, and justifies both itself and its author. It is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and its end is a benevolent one. The character of pain itself is such as to indicate that its author must be a benevolent being,--one who does not afflict for his own pleasure, but for his creatures' profit.