u see, I am differently constituted.
We are on different platforms. You are a materialist."

"I am _not_ a materialist," I began hotly.

"In my view--in my view. For it is just this question of pain
that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick;
so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies
your propositions about sin,--so long, I tell you, you are
an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.
This pain--"

I gave an impatient shrug at such sophistry.

"Oh, but it is such a little thing! A mind truly opened to
what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing.
It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust,
invisible long before the nearest star could be attained--it may be,
I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur.
But the laws we feel our way towards--Why, even on this earth, even among
living things, what pain is there?"

As he spoke he drew a little penknife from his pocket, opened the
smaller blade, and moved his chair so that I could see his thigh.
Then, choosing the place deliberately, he drove the blade into
his leg and withdrew it.

"No doubt," he said, "you have seen that before. It does not hurt
a pin-prick. But what does it show? The capacity for pain is not
needed in the muscle, and it is not placed there,--is but little
needed in the skin, and only here and there over the thigh is
a spot capable of feeling pain. Pain is simply our intrinsic
medical adviser to warn us and stimulate us. Not all living
flesh is painful; nor is all nerve, not even all sensory nerve.
There's no taint of pain, real pain, in the sensations of the optic
nerve. If you wound the optic nerve, you merely see flashes of
light,--just as disease of the auditory nerve merely means a humming
in our ears. Plants do not feel pain, nor the lower animals;
it's possible that such animals as the starfish and crayfish do not
feel pain at all. Then with men, the more intelligent they become,
the more intelligently they will see after their own welfare,
and the less they will need the goad to keep them out of danger.
I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out
of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain
gets needless.

"Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be.
It may be, I fancy, that I have seen more of the ways of this world's
Maker than you,--for I have sought