Dante's Unusual Dialectic

A quote from Dante’s Inferno, Canto VI: Dante questions whether the tortures of the inhabitants of Hell will increase, decrease, or remain. Virgil answers,

...that, as each thing to more perfection grows,
It feels more sensibly both good and pain.
Though ne’er to true perfection may arrive
This race accurst, yet nearer then, than now,
They shall approach it.
Harvard Classics, 1906 edition, p. 28.

I read “sensibly” to mean sensitively, that as man aspires, and thus moves, toward perfection the more keenly he will feel good and pain. Dante does not present the usual dialectic – good and evil, or pleasure and pain. Rather he states what becomes a part of humanism: man strives for perfection. He strives for goodness, not necessarily pleasure. His failures are painful, not necessarily sinful. The guide of Dante’s journey, Virgil, affirms that as man strives toward perfection, while he will not attain it, he will progress.