Success produces confidence.  After this discovery of the value of happiness, he proceeds, without any distrust of himself, to tell us what has been hid from all former inquirers.

“The true solution of this important question, so long and so vainly searched for by the philosophers of all ages and all countries, I take to be, at last, no more than this, that these real evils proceed from the same source as those imaginary ones of imperfection, before treated of, namely, from that subordination, without which no created system can subsist; all subordination implying imperfection, all imperfection evil, and all evil some kind of inconveniency or suffering:  so that there must, be particular inconvenieucies and sufferings annexed to every particular rank of created beings by the circumstances of things, and their modes of existence.

“God, indeed, might have made us quite other creatures, and placed us in a world quite differently constituted; but then we had been no longer men, and whatever beings had occupied our stations in the universal system, they must have been liable to the same inconveniencies.”

In all this, there is nothing that can silence the inquiries of curiosity, or culm the perturbations of doubt.  Whether subordination implies imperfection may be disputed.  The means respecting themselves may be as perfect as the end.  The weed, as a weed, is no less perfect than the oak, as an oak.  That imperfection implies evil, and evil suffering, is by no means evident.  Imperfection may imply privative evil, or the absence of some good, but this privation produces no suffering, but by the help of knowledge.  An infant at the breast is yet an imperfect man, but there is no reason for belief, that he is unhappy by his immaturity, unless some positive pain be superadded.  When this author presumes to speak of the universe, I would advise him a little to distrust his own faculties, however large and comprehensive.  Many words, easily understood on common occasions, become uncertain and figurative, when applied to the works of omnipotence.  Subordination, in human affairs, is well understood; but, when it is attributed to the universal system, its meaning grows less certain, like the petty distinctions of locality, which are of good use upon our own globe, but have no meaning with regard to infinite space, in which nothing is high or low.  That, if man, by exaltation to a higher nature, were exempted from the evils which he now suffers, some other being must suffer them; that, if man were not man, some other being must be man, is a position arising from his established notion of the scale of being.  A notion to which Pope has given some importance, by adopting it, and of which I have, therefore, endeavoured to show the uncertainty and inconsistency.  This scale of being I have demonstrated to be raised by presumptuous imagination, to rest on nothing at the bottom, to lean on nothing at the top, and to have vacuities, from step to step,