These gloomy views come from Huxley with such weight and authority that even in a sketch of his life and opinions it may be noticed that they do not seem necessary deductions from the evolutionary conception of the world.  The first count adduced against the cosmic process is its connection with suffering.  It may be doubted, so far as the animal world is concerned, if Huxley has not exaggerated the gravity of this.  The two greatest contributors to the modern conception of evolution are not in agreement with him.  Alfred Russel Wallace wrote: 

“On the whole, then, we conclude that the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and pain on 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 with the minimum of suffering and pain.  Given the necessity of death and reproduction—­and without those there could have been no progressive development of the animal world—­and it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater balance of happiness could have been secured.”

This view was evidently that also of Darwin himself, who thus concluded his chapter on the struggle for existence:  “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.”  As for man himself, though it be true that in him the consummation of pain is reached, still this is no isolated fact of far-reaching ethical importance.  It is in direct dependence on the increased physical and mental development of man, and these are equally necessary for and equally susceptible to increased pleasure and increased happiness.  It is not necessary to regard the cosmic process as evil.  Even when man, in various ages, had elaborated the conception of abstract goodness, and had endeavoured to make his justice a doling out of reward and punishment according to merit, it was not inevitable to bring in a verdict of guilty against the Cosmos.  It is quite true that, in all the ages, man has seen the sun shine on the unjust as on the just.  But it is an easy reflection that the world could not turn round on individual merit, and if few are so guilty as to deserve the agonies of grief that may come to all, still fewer deserve some of the simpler and more common joys of life.  The conception that was implicit in the disciplines of the older philosophies is still open to the philosophy of evolution.  Behind it, as behind the “self-hypnotised catalepsy of the devotee of Brahma,” the Buddhist aspirations to Nirvana, the apatheia of the Stoics, there may lie a recognition of the worthlessness of the individual:  an equable acceptation of one’s self as part of a process:  a triumph of intelligence over selfishness.  Finally, behind the sharp division made between man and the Cosmos, there still lurks one of the oldest and most enduring fallacies of the world, a fallacy that Huxley himself spent a great part of his intellectual life in discovering and routing.  The fallacy is the conception of the Cosmos as something separate and apart from man, as something through which he, however briefly, passes.  Thus Omar sang: