74.  Thus it is that the pains of the damned continue, even when they no longer serve to turn them away from evil, and that likewise the rewards of the blessed continue, even when they no longer serve for strengthening them in good.  One may say nevertheless that the damned ever bring upon themselves new pains through new sins, and that the blessed ever bring upon themselves new joys by new progress in goodness:  for both are founded on the principle of the fitness of things, which has seen to it that affairs were so ordered that the evil action must bring upon itself a chastisement.  There is good reason to believe, following the parallelism of the two realms, that of final causes and that of efficient causes, that God has established in the universe a connexion between punishment or reward and bad or good action, in accordance wherewith the first should always be attracted by the second, and virtue and vice obtain their reward and their punishment in consequence of the natural sequence of things, which contains still another kind of pre-established harmony than that which appears in the communication between the soul and the body.  For, in a word, all that God does, as I have said already, is harmonious to perfection.  Perhaps then this principle of the fitness of things would no longer apply to beings acting without true freedom or exemption from absolute necessity; and in that case corrective justice alone would be administered, and not punitive justice.  That is the opinion of the famous Conringius, in a dissertation he published on what is just.  And indeed, the reasons Pomponazzi employed in his book on fate, to prove the usefulness of chastisements and rewards, even though all should come about in our actions by a fatal necessity,[163] concern only amendment and not satisfaction, [Greek:  kolasin ou timorian].  Moreover, it is only for the sake of outward appearances that one destroys animals accessary to certain crimes, as one razes the houses of rebels, that is, to inspire terror.  Thus it is an act of corrective justice, wherein punitive justice has no part at all.

75.  But we will not amuse ourselves now by discussing a question more curious than necessary, since we have shown sufficiently that there is no such necessity in voluntary actions.  Nevertheless it was well to show that imperfect freedom alone, that is, freedom which is exempt only from constraint, would suffice as foundation for chastisements and rewards of the kind conducive to the avoidance of evil, and to amendment.  One sees also from this that some persons of intelligence, who persuade themselves that everything is necessary, are wrong in saying that none must be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished.  Apparently they say so only to exercise their wit:  the pretext is that all being necessary nothing would be in our power.  But this pretext is ill founded:  necessary actions would be still in our power, at least in so far as we could perform them or omit them,