to work.  He felt no constraining impulse, his attention was relaxed or engaged upon a novel, or his seeds, or the plan of a new house, which always excited his interest.  Then, apparently suddenly, whilst in one of his day-dreams, or in a fever (as at Ternate, to recall the historical episode when the theory of Natural Selection struck him), an explanation, a theory, a discovery,[68] the plan of a new book, came to him like a flash of light, and with the plan the material, the arguments, the illustrations; the words came tumbling one over the other in his brain, and as suddenly his idleness vanished, and work, eager, prolonged, unwearying, filled his days and months and years until the message was written down and the task fully accomplished.  Whilst writing he referred to few books, but wrote straight on, adding paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, without recasting or revision.[69] And the result was fresh, striking, original.  It was a creation.  The work being done, he relapsed into his busy idleness.  The truth, as he saw it, seemed to come to him.  Some people called him a prophet, but he was not conscious of that high calling.  I do not remember him saying that he was only a messenger.  Perhaps later, when he was reviewing his life, he connected his sudden inspirations with a higher source, but for their realisation he relied upon a foundation of veritable facts, facts patiently accumulated, a foundation laid broad and deep.  He had the vision of the prophet allied with the wisdom of the philosopher and the calm mental detachment of the man of science.  Perhaps another explanation of his genius may be found in his open-mindedness.  Truth found ready access to his conscience, and always a warm welcome, and he saw with open eyes where others were stone-blind.

He belonged to our common humanity.  No caste or acquired pride or unapproachable intellectualism cut him off from the people.  His simple humanness made him one with us all.  And his humanity was singularly comprehensive.  It led him, for instance, to investigate the subject of suffering in animals.  He noticed that all good men and women rightly shrank from giving pain to them, and he set himself to prove that the capacity for pain decreased as we descended the scale of life, and that poets and others were mistaken when they imputed acute suffering to the lower creation, because of the very restricted response of their nervous system.  Even in the case of the human infant, he concluded that only very slight sensations are at first required, and that such only are therefore developed.  The sensation of pain does not, probably, reach its maximum till the whole organism is fully developed in the adult individual.  “This,” he added, with that characteristic touch which made him kin to all oppressed people, “is rather comforting in view of the sufferings of so many infants needlessly sacrificed through the terrible defects of our vicious social system.”

To Wallace pain was the birth-cry of a soul’s advance—­the stamp of rank in nature is capacity for pain.  Pain, he held, was always strictly subordinated to the law of utility, and was never developed beyond what was actually needed for the protection and advance of life.  This brings the sensitive soul immense relief.  Our susceptibility to the higher agonies is a condition of our advance in life’s pageant.