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 rooted is it that the struggle may last till the end of time.  But, he exclaims with a ringing note—­

I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions of existence for a period longer than that now covered by history.  And much may be done to change the nature of man himself.  The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized men.

In the long struggle pain and sorrow are inevitable.  The aim of man is not to escape these, but rather to earn peace and self-respect.  To this he added a special point, in a letter of 1890:—­

If you will accept the results of the experience of an old man who has had a very chequered existence—­and has nothing to hope for except a few years of quiet downhill—­there is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection, except the sense of having worked according to one’s capacity and light, to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts.  That was the lesson I learned from Carlyle’s books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life.

The animal world, then, having the principle of its existence in a state of war, society was created by the first men who substituted the state of mutual peace for the state of mutual war.  The object of society was the limitation of the struggle for existence.  That shape of society most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of individual against individual is most strictly limited.  Happiness