The new scientific system of morality Author:George Gore Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VI. SCIENTIFIC REMARKS ON HUMAN MISERY. As the scientific explanation of the origin, necessity, and justification of misery is substantially similar to tha... more »t of untruth, as already described in the last essay, the remarks made here respecting it are brief. The statements contained in the foregoing essays largely explain the subject of human misery by showing that all, or nearly all, our experiences, feelings, and knowledge are caused by natural influences. Human misery and human happiness are each produced by the natural energy of our environments, either exciting or pacifying our feelings through the medium of our nervous system. Nearly all bodies, whether living or dead, act and react automatically upon each other, and produce in sentient creatures either pain or pleasure, according to circumstances, and they produce these different effects because each different body throughout 156 nature possesses a more or less different set of properties, and because each living creature has consciousness ; they also produce somewhat different effects in different persons, because no two persons are exactly alike. Where there is no consciousness there is no misery. These facts indicate that, as long as living men and their environments retain their present properties, so long will human misery and human pleasure exist. To accurately define either misery or happiness would be very difficult. Each is, however, a state of consciousness, and the two conditions often merge into each other. Misery is a species of pain. There are multitudes of forms of misery, and the degree of it produced depends both upon the greatness of the cause and upon the sensitiveness of the sufferer. The greatest amount is often found among ignorant persons. In the government of the universe all things are s...« less