Moral activist, insist on rigorous, continuing moral instruction and effort. Daily self-examination is important for every individual, whose ultimate purpose is to learn how to judge one’s actions clearly and firmly; each man should see that he is alone totally responsible for his deeds because he has given to the external circumstances of the deed. The faculty of choice and refusal, the power to use our external impressions, is of immense importance. When a man finds a fault in his way of using external circumstances, he must root out a dangerous growth. With all his submissiveness, man should be a great defender of the prosopon, or proper character and personality of man. Each man is free to mold it and has an obligation to the rest of the World to display it once it is molded. I like to establish something sure and secure in a World of uncertainty. The feelings of pleasure and pain that accompany sense experiences are the ultimate good and evil; all statements about good and evil are meaningful only be reference to these feelings. 

Thus far, these articles have been concerned with evils as it directly affects mankind in the forms of sin, pain, and suffering. There is also, however, the baffling problem of animal pain beneath the human level. Throughout the animal kingdom, one species devours another, and painful accidents and lingering diseases disable and then kill them. I have stopped eating meat because I thought about how cruel it is to raise something to die and then eating. On my evening walks through the park, I saw how much raccoons are, and how they have emotions and feelings, and how they are gentle and shy, and I could not bring myself to buy another, chicken, fish, turkey, nor steak. I also thought about how sad I would be if someone killed and ate my tiger “White Iverson.” However, that is just my decision, at my particular level of consciousness, and I am not judging nor criticizing anyone else. I am just doing what is right for myself. Nonetheless, how is this spectacle of nature, red in tooth and claw to be reconciled with the religious belief in an omnipotent and perfect Creator? Knowledge is a state of mind and has to be accounted for accordingly. 

Certain solutions of the problem have been proposed. It is claimed that the lower animals live wholly in the present moment and lack the high-level capacities of memory, anticipation, and conscience which give rise to the human experience of suffering as distinct from the experience of physical pain; that the pain mechanism is a necessary warning device in bodily organisms that move about within a material environment; and that an animal’s life, even though violently terminated, is predominantly active and pleasurable. Solutions of a more speculative nature have been sought in two main directions. It has been suggested that the premundane fall of Satan has had cosmic consequences, perverting the entire evolutionary process to a savage struggle for existence. From another point of view, which adopts a theme of Eastern thought, it has been suggested that there may be a continuous reincarnation of souls through the levels of animal existence up to self-consciousness in human life. Thus, the pain of animals is not wasted, but is part of a long constructive process.