It is indubitable that suffering is an important factor in the evolution of the mind as well as of the body of man. Inefficiency and defect in scientific and social contrivances are made apparent by accident, which, having entailed human suffering, is therefore productive of effort to rectify the cause of danger, and thus of reducing the risk of further punishment. Could perfect correspondence between an organism and its environment be perpetually[87] maintained, physical death could only occur as the final stage in the gradual decline of the medium of the spirit. Such natural dissolution appears to be part of the order of manifested life, requisite for its continuity and for the evolution of species, and necessary for the development of the spiritual desire for immortality. It is not of necessity a painful process, since the slow decline in physical vitality implies a corresponding decrease in sensibility, or, in other words, a decrease of physical consciousness. Premature death, the result of disease and accident, and accompanied by more or less suffering, constitutes the wages of ignorance, and only in this sense can pain and death be said to be a punishment for sin inflicted by God. If man, individually and socially, does not know how to protect himself from danger, he must pay the penalty for ignorance. Only a perfected organism, maintaining a permanent correspondence with its environment, could be permanently capable of combating physical death. And since the[88] cycle of the birth and death of all forms of life constitutes the central principle of natural law, it is difficult to imagine an eventual eternal preservation of individual physical life to be the ordained end of the evolution of humanity. When life is looked at as a whole—a point of view entailing perception of God as the supreme Spirit of Life informing and governing all matter—there appears no injustice in the suffering of the human race, or of other organisms whose evolution requires their conscious susceptibility to environment. Men must suffer for their ignorance in order to become wise, and to get wisdom they must eat from the tree of good and evil. Those who are ignorant of what is necessary for the preservation of health receive the wages of their imperfection—suffering, and premature death unto the third and fourth generations—not as the vindictive vengeance of an offended Deity, but as the remedial vindication of a persisting will of love, a transmuting process[89] which must endure until the result of fatal ignorance is expurgated from a progressive world.