341.  M. Regis, a famous Cartesian, had asserted in his ‘Metaphysics’ (part 2, book 2, c. 29) that the faculties God has given to men are the most excellent that they were capable of in conformity with the general order of nature.  ‘Considering only’, he says, ’the power of God and the nature of man by themselves, it is very easy to conceive that God could have made man more perfect:  but if one will consider man, not in himself and separately from all other creatures, but as a member of the universe and a portion which is subject to the general laws of motions, one will be bound to acknowledge that man is as perfect as he could have been.’  He adds ’that we cannot conceive that God could have employed any other means more appropriate than pain for the conservation of our bodies’.  M. Regis is right in a general way in saying that God cannot do better than he has done in relation to all.  And although there be apparently in some places in the universe rational animals more perfect than man, one may say that God was right to create every kind of species, some more perfect than others.  It is perhaps not impossible that there be somewhere a species of animals much resembling man and more perfect than we are.  It may be even that the human race will attain in time to a greater perfection than that which we can now envisage.  Thus the laws of motions do not prevent man from being more perfect:  but the place God has assigned to man in space and in time limits the perfections he was able to receive.

342.  I also doubt, with M. Bayle, whether pain be necessary in order to warn men of peril.  But this writer goes too far (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, vol.  II, ch. 77, p. 104):  he seems to think that a feeling of pleasure could have the same effect, and that, in order to prevent a child from going too near the fire, God could give him ideas of pleasure in proportion to the distance he kept from it.  This expedient does not appear very practicable with regard to all evils, unless a miracle were involved.  It is more natural that what if it were too near would cause an evil should cause some foreboding of evil when it is a little less near.  Yet I admit that it is possible such a foreboding will be something less than pain, and usually this is the case.  Thus it indeed appears that pain is not necessary for causing one to shun present peril; it is wont rather to serve as a penalty for having actually plunged into evil, and a warning against [331] further lapse.  There are also many painful evils the avoidance whereof rests not with us.  As a dissolution of the continuity of our body is a consequence of many accidents that may happen to us, it was natural that this imperfection of the body should be represented by some sense of imperfection in the soul.  Nevertheless I would not guarantee that there were no animals in the universe whose structure was cunning enough to cause a sense of indifference as accompaniment to this dissolution of continuity, as for instance when a gangrenous limb is cut off; or even a sense of pleasure, as if one were only scratching oneself.  For the imperfection that attends the dissolution of the body might lead to the sense of a greater perfection, which was suspended or checked by the continuity which is now broken:  and in this respect the body would be as it were a prison.