adapted to their environment of other types as to become exempt from
suffering as a result of this competition. There being no one integrating
cause of an intelligent or moral nature to supply the conditions of
happiness to each organic type without the misery of this competition, such
happiness as animals have is derived from the heavy expenditure of pain
suffered by themselves and by their ancestry.

Thus, whether we look to animal pleasures or to animal pains, the result is
alike just what we should expect to find on the supposition of these
pleasures and pains having been due to necessary and physical, as
distinguished from intelligent and moral, antecedents; for how different is
that which is from that which might have been! Not only might beneficent
selection have eliminated the countless species of parasites which now
destroy the health and happiness of all the higher organisms; not only
might survival of the fittest, in a moral sense, have determined that
rapacious and carnivorous animals should yield their places in the world to
harmless and gentle ones; not only might life have been without sickness
and death without pain;--but how might the exigences and the welfare of
species have been consulted by the structures and the habits of one
another! But no! Amid all the millions of mechanisms and habits in organic
nature, all of which are so beautifully adapted to the needs of the species
presenting them, there is _no single instance_ of any mechanism or habit
occurring in one species for the exclusive benefit of another
species--although, as we should expect on the non-theistic theory, there
are some comparatively few cases of a mechanism or a habit which is of
benefit to its possessor being also utilised by other species. Yet, on the
beneficent-design theory, it is impossible to understand why, when all
mechanisms and habits in the same species are invariably correlated for the
benefit of that species, there should never be any such correlation between
mechanisms and habits of different species. For how magnificent, how
sublime a display of supreme beneficence would nature have afforded if all
her sentient animals had been so inter-related as to minister to each
other's happiness! Organic species might then have been likened to a
countless multitude of voices, all singing to their Creator in one
harmonious psalm of praise. But, as it is, we see no vestige of such
correlation; every species is for itself, and for i