Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: demand upon the world and upon life. A controlling love, we may believe, is at work in the world. There is, then, some initial rational presumption that our problem is not insoluble. 3. One subordinate aspect of the problem of suffering — the suffering in the animal world — has been much accentuated in our modern time, for two reasons: first, because with the progress of Christian civilization the sensitiveness to all suffering, even animal suffering, has greatly increased. And, secondly, because the tendency of the Darwinian theory of evolution was to formulate all development in terms of "the struggle for existence," and so to seem to most minds to involve a terrible severity in the conditions under which life evolved, and a ceaseless preying of animals upon one another. As to this whole question of animal suffering, it seems clear to me, in the first place, that, even if the Darwinian theory of evolution be fully accepted, the facts would by no means warrant many of the statements made concerning the cruelty and pain of the struggle. The word struggle itself — as applied to the whole biological field — tends to mislead. Surely we may well giveheed at this point to the testimony of Darwin and Wallace themselves, as quoted by Drum- mond. Darwin says: When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply. And Wallace expresses himself even more explicitly: On the whole, the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and pain in the animal world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment of life, wit...