n the inorganic matter
generally, there is nothing to impede the action of one simple _unique_
law--the Divine Volition. With the view of producing impediment, the
organic life and matter, (complex, substantial, and law-encumbered,)
were contrived.

_P._ But again--why need this impediment have been produced?

_V._ The result of law inviolate is perfection--right--negative
happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive
pain. 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 in
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. There are many things
on the Earth, which would be nihility to the inhabitants of Venus--many
things visible and tangible in Venus, which we could not be brought
to appreciate as existing at all. But to the inorganic beings--to the
angels--the whole of the unparticled matter is substance--that is
to say, the whole of what we term "space" is to them the truest
substantiality;--the stars, meantime, through what we consider their
materiality, escaping the angelic sense, just in proportion as the
unparticled matter, through what we consider its immateriality, eludes
the organic.

As the sleep-waker pronounced these latter words, in a feeble tone,
I observed on his countenance a singular expression, which somewhat
alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at onc