LIABILITY TO PAIN. 227 



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tary intimation of physical injury received or 

 threatened; it is a provision absolutely essential 

 to his security, since, without this warning, he 

 might sustain irreparable damage without being 

 aware of it. It is a warning, too, strictly con- 

 sistent with man's intellectual superiority, and 

 furnishes a powerful stimulus to the exercise of pru- 

 dence, caution, foresight, as the means of escaping 

 it, while it acts likewise as an impulse to his skill 

 and ingenuity in remedying those evils by which 

 it is occasioned. Bodily pain would be a very 

 gratuitous and an almost unnecessary infliction, 

 if man were not highly endowed with intellectual 

 powers, by the exercise of which physical evils 

 may be avoided or obviated ; or if the very effort 

 to avoid these evils did not tend directly to ad- 

 minister to the strength and the activity of his 

 mental powers. We may truly observe that 

 among the means devised by supreme wisdom 

 for human advancement, both in a moral and 

 intellectual point of view, pain, employing the 

 term in its widest sense, is one of the most ap- 

 propriate as well as efficient. But in the case of 

 the lower animals, to what purpose could pain 

 tend, if accompanying bodily injury ? It is indeed 

 inconceivable that infinite goodness and wisdom 

 should in vain, or to little purpose, expose a vast 

 multitude of helpless creatures to physical agony. 

 There is therefore reason to believe that in 

 proportion as the lower orders of animated crea- 

 tures are exposed to injury they are free from 

 those sufferings which injuries produce in those 



