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 his laws, in my way, all my life, while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies.
And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell.
Pleasure and pain—bah!
What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in the dark?
This store which men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them,—the mark of the beast from which they came!
Pain, pain and pleasure, they are for us only so long as we wriggle in the dust.
“You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me.
That is the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got a fresh question.
Was this possible or that possible?
You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him!
You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!
The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature, but a problem!
Sympathetic pain,—all I know of it I remember as a thing I used to suffer from years ago.
I wanted—it was the one thing I wanted—to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.”
“But,” said I, “the thing is an abomination—”
“To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter,” he continued.
“The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing; and the material has—dripped into the huts yonder. It is nearly eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery and six Kanakas.
I remember the green stillness of the island and the empty ocean about us, as though it was yesterday.
The place seemed waiting for me.
“The stores were landed and the house was built.
The Kanakas founded some huts near the ravine.
I went to work here upon what I had brought with me.
There were some disagreeable things happened at first.
I began with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip of the scalpel.
I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear and left it bound up to heal.
It looked quite human to me when I had finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it.
It remembered me, and was terrified beyond imagination; and it had no more than the wits of a sheep.
The more I looked at it the clumsier it seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery.
These animals without courage, these fear-haunted, pain-driven things, without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment,—they are no good for man-making.
“Then I took a gorilla I had; and upon that, working with infinite care and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man.
All the week, night and day, I moulded him.
With him it was chiefly the brain that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed.
I thought him a fair specimen of the negroid type when I had finished him, and he lay bandaged, bound, and motionless before me.
It was only when his life was assured that I left him and came into this room again, and found Montgomery much as you are.
He had heard some of the cries as the thing grew human,—cries like those that disturbed you so.
I didn't take him completely into my confidence at first.
And the Kanakas too, had realised something of it.
They were scared out of their wits by the sight of me.
I got Montgomery over to me—in a way; but I and he had the hardest job to prevent the Kanakas deserting.