Payment _may_ assume a penal form: do not think this its only form.
And to take the law at once out of the limitations which these
examples suggest, let me show you that it is a law of healthy and
unlamenting Nature. Look at the scale of existence, and you will see
that for every step of advance in that scale payment is required.
The animal is higher than the vegetable; the animal, accordingly, is
subject to the sense of pain, the vegetable not; and among animals the
pain may be keener as the organization is nobler. The susceptibility
not only to pain, but to vital injury, observes the same gradation.
A little girdling kills an oak; but some low fungus may be cut and
troubled and trampled _ad libitum_, and it will not perish; and along
the shores, farmers year after year pluck sea-weed from the rocks,
and year after year it springs again lively as ever. Among the lowest
orders of animals you shall find a creature that, if you cut it in
two, straightway duplicates its existence and floats away twice as
happy as before; but of the prick of a bodkin or the sting of a bee
the noblest of men may die.
In the animal body the organs make a draft from the general vigors
of the system just in proportion to their dignity.
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