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The growing social consciousness of our times is most keenly stirred by a sense of pain. We are beginning to feel the great common processes of human life; but we feel them, at first, only when they hurt. Our individual distresses we have always felt; and have voiced our anguish and resentment more and more loudly as civilisation progressed. Earlier man—and in particular the unhappy savage, with his unavoidable privations, dangers, and mishaps, and his ingenious systems of self-torture—had more to hurt him, but made far less fuss about it. For many an age the pain of human life has formed so conspicuous a fact that we have called the earth “The Star of Suffering.” Our common illustrations of happiness are drawn from the lower animals: “as happy as a clam,” we say; “as gay as a lark”; “as merry as a cricket.”

The world’s greatest religions have rested on a conception of general human unhappiness. Divine curses are held to account for it, Divine blessings to allay it, and a future life to recompense us for it—if we are good; but the basic proposition is the unhappiness of human life. Again, we are given a theory of reincarnation; of a slow transmigration through many lines towards a plane where we do not feel, feeling being admitted to mean pain. In Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, from the Happy Hunting Grounds and Walhalla to our most refined conception of eternal progress, the bliss of a future life is advanced as some countercheck to the misery of this one, some hope to enable us to live.