Through the impediments afforded by the number,
complexity, and substantiality of the laws of organic life and matter,
the violation of law is rendered, to a certain extent, practicable.
Thus pain, which is the inorganic life is impossible, is possible in
the organic.
P. But to what good end is pain thus rendered possible?
V. All things are either good or bad by comparison. A sufficient
analysis will show that pleasure in all cases, is but the contrast
of pain. Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one
point we must have suffered at the same. Never to suffer would have
been never to have been blessed. But it has been shown that, in the
inorganic life, pain cannot be; thus the necessity for the organic.
The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the
bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven.
P. Still there is one of your expressions which I find it impossible
to comprehend- "the truly substantive vastness of infinity."
V. This, probably, is because you have no sufficiently generic
conception of the term "substance" itself. We must not regard it as
a quality, but as a sentiment:- it is the perception, in thinking
beings, of the adaptation of matter to their organization.
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