.90 PURPOSE AND GENERAL CONDITION" 



of a more hardy character ; but we always see hardiness 

 and insensibility go together, and it may be of course 

 presumed that we only could have purchased this immu- 

 nity from suffering at the expense of a large portion of 

 that delicacy in which lie some of our most agreeable 

 sensations. Or man's faculties might have been restrict- 

 ed to definiteness of action, as is greatly the case with, 

 those of the lower animals, and thus we should have 

 been equally safe from the aberrations which lead to 

 disease ; but in that event we should have been incapable 

 of acting to so many different purposes as we are, and of 

 the many high enjoyments which the varied action of our 

 faculties places in our power: we should not, in short, 

 have been human beings, but merely on a level with the 

 inferior animals. Thus it appears that the very fine- 

 ness of man's constitution, that which places him in 

 such a high relation to the mundane economy, and makes 

 him the vehicle of so many exquisitely delightful sen- 

 sations — it is this which makes him liable to the suffer- 

 ings of disease. It might be said, on the other hand, 

 that the noxiousness of the agencies producing disease 

 might have been diminished or extinguished; but the 

 probability is, that this could not have been done withou* 

 such a derangement of the whole economy of nature as 

 would have been attended with more serious evils. For 

 example — a large class of diseases are the result of efflu- 

 via from decaying organic matter. This kind of matter 

 is known to be extremely useful, when mixed with earth, 

 in favoring the process of vegetation. Supposing the 

 noxiousness to the human constitution done away with, 

 might we not also lose that important quality which 

 tends so largely to increase the food raised from the 

 ground ? Perhaps (as has been suggested) the noxious- 

 ness is even a matter of special design, to induce us to 

 put away decaying organic substances into the earth, 

 where they are calculated to be so useful. Now man has 

 reason to enable him to see that such substances are bene- 

 ficial under one arrangement, and noxious in the other 

 He is, as it were, commanded to take the right method in 

 dealing with it. In point of fact, men do not always 

 ake this method, but allow accumulations of noxious 

 matter to gather close about their dwellings, where they 

 generate fevers and agues. But their doing so may be 

 regarded as only a temporary exception from the opera- 



