CHAPTER I. OF THE WORLD.

Produced by John Hamm, Barb Grow, Bill Burn, Chris Hall

and Chris Brennen

ESSAYS AND MISCELLANIES

The Complete Works Volume 3

By Plutarch

CONTENTS

PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS

That It Is Not Possible To Live Pleasurably According To The

Doctrine Of Epicurus

That A Philosopher Ought Chiefly To Converse With Great Men

Sentiments Concerning Nature, With Which Philosophers Were

Delighted

Abstract Of A Discourse Showing That The Stoics Speak Greater

Improbabilities Than The Poets

Symposiacs

Common Conceptions Against The Stoics

Contradictions Of The Stoics

The Eating Of Flesh

Concerning Fate

Against Colotes, The Disciple And Favorite Of Epicurus

Platonic Questions

LITERARY ESSAYS

The Life And Poetry Of Homer

The Banquet Of The Seven Wise Men

How A Young Man Ought To Hear Poems

Abstract Of A Comparison Between Aristophanes And Menander

The Malice Of Herodotus

PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS

THAT IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO LIVE PLEASURABLY ACCORDING TO THE DOCTRINE OF

EPICURUS.

PLUTARCH, ZEUXIPPUS, THEON, ARISTODEMUS.

Epicurus's great confidant and familiar, Colotes, set forth a book with

this title to it, that according to the tenets of the other philosophers

it is impossible to live. Now what occurred to me then to say against

him, in the defence of those philosophers, hath been already put into

writing by me. But since upon breaking up of our lecture several things

have happened to be spoken afterwards in the walks in further opposition

to his party, I thought it not amiss to recollect them also, if for

no other reason, yet for this one, that those who will needs be

contradicting other men may see that they ought not to run cursorily

over the discourses and writings of those they would disprove, nor by

tearing out one word here and another there, or by falling foul upon

particular passages without the books, to impose upon the ignorant and

unlearned.

Now as we were leaving the school to take a walk (as our manner is) in

the gymnasium, Zeuxippus began to us: In my opinion, said he, the debate

was managed on our side with more softness and less freedom than was

fitting. I am sure, Heraclides went away disgusted with us, for handling

Epicurus and Aletrodorus more roughly than they deserved. Yet you

may remember, replied Theon, how you told them that Colotes himself,

compared with the rhetoric of those two gentlemen, would appear the

complaisantest man alive; for when they have raked together the

lewdest terms of ignominy the tongue of man ever used, as buffooneries,

trollings, arrogancies, whorings, assassinations, whining counterfeits,

black-guards, and blockheads, they faintly throw them in the faces of

Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Protagoras, Theophrastus, Heraclides,

Hipparchus, and which not, even of the best and most celebrated

authorities. So that, should they pass for very knowing men upon all

other accounts, yet their very calumnies and reviling language would

bespeak them at the greatest distance from philosophy imaginable. For

emulation can never enter that godlike consort, nor such fretfulness

as wants resolution to conceal its own resentments. Aristodemus then

subjoined: Heraclides, you know, is a great philologist; and that may

be the reason why he made Epicurus those amends for the poetic din (so,

that party style poetry) and for the fooleries of Homer; or else, it may

be, it was because Metrodorus had libelled that poet in so many books.

But let us let these gentlemen pass at present, Zeuxippus, and rather

return to what was charged upon the philosophers in the beginning of our

discourse, that it is impossible to live according to their tenets. And

I see not why we two may not despatch this affair betwixt us, with the

good assistance of Theon; for I find this gentleman (meaning me) is

already tired. Then Theon said to him,

Our fellows have that garland from us won;

therefore, if you please,

Let's fix another goal, and at that run.

("Odyssey," xxii, 6)

We will even prosecute them at the suit of the philosophers, in the

following form: We'll prove, if we can, that it is impossible to live

a pleasurable life according to their tenets. Bless me! said I to him,

smiling, you seem to me to level your foot at the very bellies of the

men, and to design to enter the list with them for their lives, whilst

you go about to rob them thus of their pleasure, and they cry out to

you,

"Forbear, we're no good boxers, sir;

no, nor good pleaders, nor good senators, nor good magistrates either;

"Our proper talent is to eat and drink."

("Odyssey," viii, 246, 248)

and to excite such tender and delicate motions in our bodies as may

chafe our imaginations to some jolly delight or gayety." And therefore

you seem to me not so much to take off (as I may say) the pleasurable

part, as to deprive the men of their very lives, while you will not

leave them to live pleasurably. Nay then, said Theon, if you approve so

highly of this subject, why do you not set in hand to it? By all means,

said I, I am for this, and shall not only hear but answer you too, if

you shall insist. But I must leave it to you to take the lead.

Then, after Theon had spoken something to excuse himself, Aristodemus

said: When we had so short and fair a cut to our design, how have you

blocked up the way before us, by preventing us from joining issue with

the faction at the very first upon the single point of propriety! For

you must grant, it can be no easy matter to drive men already possessed

that pleasure is their utmost good yet to believe a life of pleasure

impossible to be attained. But now the truth is, that when they failed

of living becomingly they failed also of living pleasurably; for to

live pleasurably without living becomingly is even by themselves allowed

inconsistent.

Theon then said: We may probably resume the consideration of that in

the process of our discourse; in the interim we will make use of their

concessions. Now they suppose their last good to lie about the belly and

such other conveyances of the body as let in pleasure and not pain; and

are of opinion, that all the brave and ingenious inventions that ever

have been were contrived at first for the pleasure of the belly, or the

good hope of compassing such pleasure,--as the sage Metrodorus informs

us. By which, my good friend, it is very plain, they found their

pleasure in a poor, rotten, and unsure thing, and one that is equally

perforated for pains, by the very passages they receive their pleasures

by; or rather indeed, that admits pleasure but by a few, but pain by

all its parts. For the whole of pleasure is in a manner in the joints,

nerves, feet, and hands; and these are oft the seats of very grievous

and lamentable distempers, as gouts, corroding rheums, gangrenes, and

putrid ulcers. And if you apply to yourself the exquisitest of perfumes

or gusts, you will find but some one small part of your body is finely

and delicately touched, while the rest are many times filled with

anguish and complaints. Besides, there is no part of us proof against

fire, sword, teeth, or scourges, or insensible of dolors and aches; yea,

heats, colds, and fevers sink into all our parts alike. But pleasures,

like gales of soft wind, move simpering, one towards one extreme of the

body and another towards another, and then go off in a vapor. Nor are

they of any long durance, but, as so many glancing meteors, they are

no sooner kindled in the body than they are quenched by it. As to pain,

Aeschylus's Philoctetes affords us a sufficient testimony:--

The cruel viper ne'er will quit my foot;

Her dire envenomed teeth have there ta'en root.

For pain will not troll off as pleasure doth, nor imitate it in its

pleasing and tickling touches. But as the clover twists its perplexed

and winding roots into the earth, and through its coarseness abides

there a long time; so pain disperses and entangles its hooks and roots

in the body, and continues there, not for a day or a night, but for

several seasons of years, if not for some revolutions of Olympiads, nor

scarce ever departs unless struck out by other pains, as by stronger

nails. For who ever drank so long as those that are in a fever are

a-dry? Or who was ever so long eating as those that are besieged

suffer hunger? Or where are there any that are so long solaced with the

conversation of friends as tyrants are racking and tormenting? Now all

this is owing to the baseness of the body and its natural incapacity for

a pleasurable life; for it bears pains better than it doth pleasures,

and with respect to those is firm and hardy, but with respect to these

is feeble and soon palled. To which add, that if we are minded to

discourse on a life of pleasure, these men won't give us leave to go on,

but will presently confess themselves that the pleasures of the body are

but short, or rather indeed but of a moment's continuance; if they do

not design to banter us or else speak out of vanity, when Metrodorus

tells us, We many times spit at the pleasures of the body, and Epicurus

saith, A wise man, when he is sick, many times laughs in the very

extremity of his distemper.

For Ithaca is no fit place

For mettled steeds to run a race.

("Odyssey," iv. 605.)

Neither can the joys of our poor bodies be smooth and equal; but on the

contrary they must be coarse and harsh, and immixed with much that is

displeasing and inflamed.

Zeuxippus then said: And do you not think then they take the right

course to begin at the body, where they observe pleasure to have its

first rise, and thence to pass to the mind as the more stable and sure

part, there to complete and crown the whole?

They do, by Jove, I said; and if, after removing thither they have

indeed found something more consummate than before, a course too as well

agreeing with nature as becoming men adorned with both contemplative and

civil knowledge. But if after all this you still hear them cry out, and

protest that the mind of man can receive no satisfaction or tranquillity

from anything under Heaven but the pleasures of the body either in

possession or expectance, and that these are its proper and only good,

can you forbear thinking they make use of the soul but as a funnel

for the body, while they mellow their pleasure by shifting it from one

vessel to another, as they rack wine out of an old and leaky vessel

into a new one and there let it grow old, and then imagine they have

performed some extraordinary and very fine thing? True indeed, a fresh

pipe may both keep and recover wine that hath thus been drawn off; but

the mind, receiving but the remembrance only of past pleasure, like a

kind of scent, retains that and no more. For as soon as it hath given

one hiss in the body, it immediately expires, and that little of it that

stays behind in the memory is but flat and like a queasy fume: as if a

man should lay up and treasure in his fancy what he either ate or drank

yesterday, that he may have recourse to that when he wants fresh fare.

See now how much more temperate the Cyrenaics are, who, though they have

drunk out of the same bottle with Epicurus, yet will not allow men so

much as to practise their amours by candlelight, but only under

the covert of the dark, for fear seeing should fasten too quick an

impression of the images of such actions upon the fancy and thereby

too frequently inflame the desire. But these gentlemen account it the

highest accomplishment of a philosopher to have a clear and retentive

memory of all the various figures, passions, and touches of past

pleasure. We will not now say, they present us with nothing worthy the

name of philosophy, while they leave the refuse of pleasure in their

wise man's mind, as if it could be a lodging for bodies; but that it is

impossible such things as these should make a man live pleasurably, I

think is abundantly manifest from hence.

For it will not perhaps seem strange if I assert, that the memory of

pleasure past brings no pleasure with it if it appeared but little in

the very enjoyment, or to men of such abstinence as to account it for

their benefit to retire from its first approaches; when even the most

amazed and sensual admirers of corporeal delights remain no longer in

their gaudy and pleasant humor than their pleasure lasts them. What

remains is but an empty shadow and dream of that pleasure that hath now

taken wing and is fled from them, and that serves but for fuel to foment

their untamed desires. Like as in those that dream they are a-dry or in

love, their unaccomplished pleasures and enjoyments do but excite the

inclination to a greater keenness. Nor indeed can the remembrance of

past enjoyments afford them any real contentment at all, but must serve

only, with the help of a quick desire, to raise up very much of outrage

and stinging pain out of the remains of a feeble and befooling pleasure.

Neither doth it befit men of continence and sobriety to exercise their

thoughts about such poor things, or to do what one twitted Carneades

with, to reckon, as out of a diurnal, how oft they have lain with

Hedia or Leontion, or where they last drank Thasian wine, or at what

twentieth-day feast they had a costly supper. For such transport and

captivatedness of the mind to its own remembrances as this is would show

a detestable and bestial restlessness and raving towards the present

and hoped-for acts of pleasure. And therefore I cannot but look upon

the sense of these inconveniences as the true cause of their retiring

at last to a freedom from pain and a firm state of body; as if living

pleasurably could lie in bare imagining this either past or future to

some persons. True indeed it is, "that a sound state of body and a good

assurance of its continuing must needs afford a most transcending and

solid satisfaction to all men capable of reasoning."

But yet look first what work they make, while they course this same

thing--whether it be pleasure, exemption from pain, or good health--up

and down, first from the body to the mind, and then back again from the

mind to the body, being compelled to return it to its first origin,

lest it should run out and so give them the slip. Thus they place the

pleasure of the body (as Epicurus says) upon the complacent joy in the

mind, and yet conclude again with the good hopes that complacent

joy hath in bodily pleasure. Indeed what wonder is it if, when the

foundation shakes, the superstructure totter? Or that there should be no

sure hope nor unshaken joy in a matter that suffers so great concussion

and changes as continually attend a body exposed to so many violences

and strokes from without, and having within it the origins of such evils

as human reason cannot avert? For if it could, no understanding man

would ever fall under stranguries, gripes, consumptions, or dropsies;

with some of which Epicurus himself did conflict and Polyaenus with

others, while others of them were the deaths of Neocles and Agathobulus.

And this we mention not to disparage them, knowing very well that

Pherecydes and Heraclitus, both very excellent persons, labored under

very uncouth and calamitous distempers. We only beg of them, if they

will own their own diseases and not by noisy rants and popular harangues

incur the imputation of false bravery, either not to take the health of

the whole body for the ground of their content, or else not to say that

men under the extremities of dolors and diseases can yet rally and be

pleasant. For a sound and hale constitution of body is indeed a

thing that often happens, but a firm and steadfast assurance of

its continuance can never befall an intelligent mind. But as at sea

(according to Aeschylus)

Night to the ablest pilot trouble brings,

(Aechylus, "Suppliants," 770.)

and so will a calm too, for no man knows what will be,--so likewise

is it impossible for a soul that dwells in a healthful body, and that

places her good in the hopes she hath of that body, to perfect her

voyage here without frights or waves. For man's mind hath not, like the

sea, its tempests and storms only from without it, but it also raises up

from within far more and greater disturbances. And a man may with more

reason look for constant fair weather in the midst of winter than for

perpetual exemption from afflictions in his body. For what else hath

given the poets occasion to term us ephemeral creatures, uncertain and

unfixed, and to liken our lives to leaves that both spring and fall in

the lapse of a summer, but the unhappy, calamitous, and sickly condition

of the body, whose very utmost good we are warned to dread and prevent?

For an exquisite habit, Hippocrates saith, is slippery and hazardous.

And

He that but now looked jolly, plump, and stout,

Like a star shot by Jove, is now gone out;

as it is in Euripides. And it is a vulgar persuasion, that very handsome

persons, when looked upon, oft suffer damage by envy and an evil eye;

for a body at its utmost vigor will through delicacy very soon admit of

changes.

But now that these men are miserably unprovided for an undisturbed life,

you may discern even from what they themselves advance against others.

For they say that those who commit wickedness and incur the displeasure

of the laws live in constant misery and fear, for, though they may

perhaps attain to privacy, yet it is impossible they should ever be well

assured of that privacy; whence the ever impending fear of the future

will not permit them to have either complacency or assurance in their

present circumstances. But they consider not how they speak all this

against themselves. For a sound and healthy state of body they may

indeed oftentimes possess, but that they should ever be well assured of

its continuance is impossible; and they must of necessity be in constant

disquiet and pain for the body with respect to futurity, never being

able to reach that firm and steadfast assurance which they expect. But

to do no wickedness will contribute nothing to our assurance; for it is

not suffering unjustly but suffering in itself that is dismaying. Nor

can it be a matter of trouble to be engaged in villanies one's self, and

not afflictive to suffer by the villanies of others. Neither can it

be said that the tyranny of Lachares was less, if it was not more,

calamitous to the Athenians, and that of Dionysius to the Syracusans,

than they were to the tyrants themselves; for it was disturbing that

made them be disturbed; and their first oppressing and pestering of

others gave them occasion to expect to suffer ill themselves. Why should

a man recount the outrages of rabbles, the barbarities of thieves,

or the villanies of inheritors, or yet the contagions of airs and the

concursions of seas, by which Epicurus (as himself writeth) was in his

voyage to Lampsacus within very little of drowning? The very composition

of the body--it containing in it the matter of all diseases, and (to use

a pleasantry of the vulgar) cutting thongs for the beast out of its own

hide, I mean pains out of the body--is sufficient to make life perilous

and uneasy, and that to the good as well as to the bad, if they have

learned to set their complacence and assurance in the body and the hopes

they have of it, and in nothing else; as Epicurus hath written, as well

in many other of his discourses as in that of Man's End.

They therefore assign not only a treacherous and unsure ground of their

pleasurable living, but also one in all respects despicable and little,

if the escaping of evils be the matter of their complacence and last

good. But now they tell us, nothing else can be so much as imagined, and

nature hath no other place to bestow her good in but only that out

of which her evil hath been driven; as Metrodorus speaks in his book

against the Sophists. So that this single thing, to escape evil, he

says, is the supreme good; for there is no room to lodge this good in

where no more of what is painful and afflicting goes out. Like unto this

is that of Epicurus, where he saith: The very essence of good arises

from the escaping of bad, and a man's recollecting, considering, and

rejoicing within himself that this hath befallen him. For what occasions

transcending joy (he saith) is some great impending evil escaped; and

in this lies the very nature and essence of good, if a man consider it

aright, and contain himself when he hath done, and not ramble and prate

idly about it. Oh, the rare satisfaction and felicity these men enjoy,

that can thus rejoice for having undergone no evil and endured neither

sorrow nor pain! Have they not reason, think you, to value themselves

for such things as these, and to speak as they are wont when they

style themselves immortals and equals to gods?--and when, through the

excessiveness and transcendency of the blessed things they enjoy, they

rave even to the degree of whooping and hollowing for very satisfaction

that, to the shame of all mortals, they have been the only men that

could find out this celestial and divine good that lies in an exemption

from all evil? So that their beatitude differs little from that of swine

and sheep, while they place it in a mere tolerable and contented state,

either of the body, or of the mind upon the body's account. For even the

more prudent and more ingenious sort of brutes do not esteem escaping

of evil their last end; but when they have taken their repast, they are

disposed next by fullness to singing, and they divert themselves with

swimming and flying; and their gayety and sprightliness prompt them to

entertain themselves with attempting to counterfeit all sorts of voices

and notes; and then they make their caresses to one another, by skipping

and dancing one towards another; nature inciting them, after they have

escaped evil, to look after some good, or rather to shake off what

they find uneasy and disagreeing, as an impediment to their pursuit of

something better and more congenial.

For what we cannot be without deserves not the name of good; but that

which claims our desire and preference must be something beyond a bare

escape from evil. And so, by Jove, must that be too that is either

agreeing or congenial to us, according to Plato, who will not allow

us to give the name of pleasures to the bare departures of sorrows and

pains, but would have us look upon them rather as obscure draughts and

mixtures of agreeing and disagreeing, as of black and white, while

the extremes would advance themselves to a middle temperament. But

oftentimes unskilfulness and ignorance of the true nature of extreme

occasions some to mistake the middle temperament for the extreme and

outmost part. Thus do Epicurus and Metrodorus, while they make avoiding

of evil to be the very essence and consummation of good, and so receive

but as it were the satisfaction of slaves or of rogues newly discharged

the jail, who are well enough contented if they may but wash and supple

their sores and the stripes they received by whipping, but never in

their lives had one taste or sight of a generous, clean, unmixed and

unulcerated joy. For it follows not that, if it be vexatious to have

one's body itch or one's eyes to run, it must be therefore a blessing to

scratch one's self, and to wipe one's eye with a rag; nor that, if it

be bad to be dejected or dismayed at divine matters or to be discomposed

with the relations of hell, therefore the bare avoiding of all this

must be some happy and amiable thing. The truth is, these men's opinion,

though it pretends so far to outgo that of the vulgar, allows their

joy but a straight and narrow compass to toss and tumble in, while it

extends it but to an exemption from the fear of hell, and so makes that

the top of acquired wisdom which is doubtless natural to the brutes.

For if freedom from bodily pain be still the same, whether it come by

endeavor or by nature, neither then is an undisturbed state of mind the

greater for being attained to by industry than if it came by nature.

Though a man may with good reason maintain that to be the more confirmed

habit of the mind which naturally admits of no disorder, than that which

by application and judgment eschews it.

But let us suppose them both equal; they will yet appear not one jot

superior to the beasts for being unconcerned at the stories of hell

and the legends of the gods, and for not expecting endless sorrows and

everlasting torments hereafter. For it is Epicurus himself that tells

us that, had our surmises about heavenly phenomena and our foolish

apprehensions of death and the pains that ensue it given us no disquiet,

we had not then needed to contemplate nature for our relief. For neither

have the brutes any weak surmises of the gods or fond opinion about

things after death to disorder themselves with; nor have they as much as

imagination or notion that there is anything in these to be dreaded. I

confess, had they left us the benign providence of God as a presumption,

wise men might then seem, by reason of their good hopes from thence, to

have something towards a pleasurable life that beasts have not. But now,

since they have made it the scope of all their discourses of God that

they may not fear him, but may be eased of all concern about him, I much

question whether those that never thought at all of him have not this in

a more confirmed degree than they that have learned to think he can do

no harm. For if they were never freed from superstition, they never fell

into it; and if they never laid aside a disturbing conceit of God, they

never took one up. The like may be said as to hell and the future state.

For though neither the Epicurean nor the brute can hope for any good

thence; yet such as have no forethought of death at all cannot but be

less amused and scared with what comes after it than they that betake

themselves to the principle that death is nothing to us. But something

to them it must be, at least so far as they concern themselves to reason

about it and contemplate it; but the beasts are wholly exempted from

thinking of what appertains not to them; and if they fly from blows,

wounds, and slaughters, they fear no more in death than is dismaying to

the Epicurean himself.

Such then are the things they boast to have attained by their

philosophy. Let us now see what those are they deprive themselves of and

chase away from them. For those diffusions of the mind that arise

from the body, and the pleasing condition of the body, if they be

but moderate, appear to have nothing in them that is either great or

considerable; but if they be excessive, besides their being vain and

uncertain, they are also importune and petulant; nor should a man term

them either mental satisfactions or gayeties, but rather corporeal

gratifications, they being at best but the simperings and effeminacies

of the mind. But now such as justly deserve the names of complacencies

and joys are wholly refined from their contraries, and are immixed with

neither vexation, remorse, nor repentance; and their good is congenial

to the mind and truly mental and genuine, and not superinduced. Nor is

it devoid of reason, but most rational, as springing either from that in

the mind that is contemplative and inquiring, or else from that part

of it that is active and heroic. How many and how great satisfactions

either of these affords us, no one can ever relate. But to hint briefly

at some of them. We have the historians before us, which, though they

find us many and delightful exercises, still leave our desire after

truth insatiate and uncloyed with pleasure, through which even lies

are not without their grace. Yea, tales and poetic fictions, while they

cannot gain upon our belief, have something in them that is charming to

us.

For do but think with yourself, with what a sting we read Plato's

"Atlantic" and the conclusion of the "Iliad," and how we hanker and gape

after the rest of the tale, as when some beautiful temple or theatre is

shut up. But now the informing of ourselves with the truth herself is

a thing so delectable and lovely as if our very life and being were for

the sake of knowing. And the darkest and grimmest things in death are

its oblivion, ignorance, and obscurity. Whence, by Jove, it is that

almost all mankind encounter with those that would destroy the sense

of the departed, as placing the very whole of their life, being, and

satisfaction solely in the sensible and knowing part of the mind. For

even the things that grieve and afflict us yet afford us a sort of

pleasure in the hearing. And it is often seen that those that are

disordered by what is told them, even to the degree of weeping,

notwithstanding require the telling of it. So he in the tragedy who is

told,

Alas I now the very worst must tell,

replies,

I dread to hear it too, but I must hear.

(Sophocles, "Pedipus Tyrannus," 1169, 1170.)

But this may seem perhaps a sort of intemperateness of delight in

knowing everything, and as it were a stream violently bearing down the

reasoning faculty. But now, when a story that hath in it nothing that is

troubling and afflictive treats of great and heroic enterprises with a

potency and grace of style such as we find in Herodotus's Grecian and in

Xenophon's Persian history, or in what,

Inspired by heavenly gods, sage Homer sung,

or in the Travels of Euxodus, the Foundations and Republics of

Aristotle, and the Lives of Famous Men compiled by Aristoxenus; these

will not only bring us exceeding much and great contentment, but such

also as is clean and secure from repentance. And who could take greater

satisfaction either in eating when a-hungry or drinking when a-dry

amongst the Phaeacians, than in going over Ulysses's relation of his

own voyage and rambles? And what man could be better pleased with the

embraces of the most exquisite beauty, than with sitting up all night

to read over what Xenophon hath written of Panthea, or Aristobulus of

Timoclea, or Theopompus of Thebe?

But now these appertain all solely to the mind. But they chase away

from them the delights that accrue from the mathematics also. Though the

satisfactions we receive from history have in them something simple and

equal; but those that come from geometry, astronomy, and music inveigle

and allure us with a sort of nimbleness and variety, and want nothing

that is tempting and engaging; their figures attracting us as so many

charms, whereof whoever hath once tasted, if he be but competently

skilled, will run about chanting that in Sophocles,

I'm mad; the Muses with new rage inspire me.

I'll mount the hill; my lyre, my numbers fire me.

(From the "Thamyras" of Sophocles, Frag. 225)

Nor doth Thamyras break out into poetic raptures upon any other score;

nor, by Jove, Euxodus, Aristarchus, or Archimedes. And when the lovers

of the art of painting are so enamoured with the charmingness of their

own performances, that Nicias, as he was drawing the Evocation of Ghosts

in Homer, often asked his servants whether he had dined or no, and when

King Ptolemy had sent him threescore talents for his piece, after it was

finished, he neither would accept the money nor part with his work; what

and how great satisfactions may we then suppose to have been reaped

from geometry and astronomy by Euclid when he wrote his Dioptrics, by

Philippus when he had perfected his demonstration of the figure of the

moon, by Archimedes when with the help of a certain angle he had found

the sun's diameter to make the same part of the largest circle that that

angle made of four right angles, and by Apollonius and Aristarchus who

were the inventors of some other things of the like nature? The bare

contemplating and comprehending of all these now engender in the

learners both unspeakable delights and a marvellous height of spirit.

And it doth in no wise beseem me, by comparing with these the fulsome

debauchees of victualling-houses and stews, to contaminate Helicon and

the Muses,--

Where swain his flock ne'er fed,

Nor tree by hatchet bled.

(Euripides, "Hippolytus," 75.)

But these are the verdant and untrampled pastures of ingenious bees;

but those are more like the mange of lecherous boars and he-goats. And

though a voluptuous temper of mind be naturally erratic and precipitate,

yet never any yet sacrificed an ox for joy that he had gained his will

of his mistress; nor did any ever wish to die immediately, might he but

once satiate himself with the costly dishes and comfits at the table of

his prince. But now Eudoxus wished he might stand by the sun, and inform

himself of the figure, magnitude, and beauty of that luminary, though

he were, like Phaethon, consumed by it. And Pythagoras offered an ox in

sacrifice for having completed the lines of a certain geometric diagram;

as Apollodotus tells us,

When the famed lines Pythagoras devised,

For which a splendid ox he sacrificed.

Whether it was that by which he showed that the line that regards the

right angle in a triangle is equivalent to the two lines that contain

that angle, or the problem about the area of the parabolic section of

a cone. And Archimedes's servants were forced to hale him away from his

draughts, to be anointed in the bath; but he notwithstanding drew the

lines upon his belly with his strigil. And when, as he was washing

(as the story goes of him), he thought of a manner of computing the

proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing

over the bathing-stool, he leaped up as one possessed or inspired,

crying, "I have found it;" which after he had several times repeated,

he went his way. But we never yet heard of a glutton that exclaimed

with such vehemence, "I have eaten," or of an amorous gallant that ever

cried, "I have kissed," among the many millions of dissolute debauchees

that both this and preceding ages have produced. Yea, we abominate those

that make mention of their great suppers with too luscious a gust, as

men overmuch taken with mean and abject delights. But we find ourselves

in one and the same ecstasy with Eudoxus, Archimedes, and Hipparchus;

and we readily give assent to Plato when he saith of the mathematics,

that while ignorance and unskilledness make men despise them, they still

thrive notwithstanding by reason of their charmingness, in despite of

contempt.

These then so great and so many pleasures, that run like perpetual

springs and rills, these men decline and avoid; nor will they permit

those that put in among them so much as to take a taste of them, but bid

them hoist up the little sails of their paltry cock-boats and fly from

them. Nay, they all, both he and she philosophers, beg and entreat

Pythocles, for dear Epicurus's sake, not to affect or make such account

of the sciences called liberal. And when they cry up and defend one

Apelles, they write of him that he kept himself clean by refraining

himself all along from the mathematics. But as to history--to pass over

their aversedness to other kinds of compositions--I shall only present

you with the words of Metrodorus, who in his treatise of the Poets

writes thus: Wherefore let it never disturb you, if you know not either

what side Hector was of, or the first verses in Homer's Poem, or

again what is in its middle. But that the pleasures of the body spend

themselves like the winds called Etesian or Anniversary, and utterly

determine when once age is past its vigor, Epicurus himself was not

insensible; and therefore he makes it a problematic question, whether a

sage philosopher, when he is an old man and disabled for enjoyment, may

not still be recreated with having handsome girls to feel and grope him,

being not, it seems, of the mind of old Sophocles, who thanked God he

had at length escaped from this kind of pleasure, as from an untamed and

furious master. But, in my opinion, it would be more advisable for these

sensual lechers, when they see that age will dry up so many of their

pleasures, and that, as Euripides saith,

Dame Venus is to ancient men a foe,

(Euripides, "Aeolus," Frag. 23.)

in the first place to collect and lay up in store, as against a siege,

these other pleasures, as a sort of provision that will not impair and

decay; that then, after they have celebrated the venereal festivals

of life, they may spend a cleanly after-feast in reading over the

historians and poets, or else in problems of music and geometry. For

it would never have come into their minds so much as to think of these

purblind and toothless gropings and spurtings of lechery, had they but

learned, if nothing more, to write comments upon Homer or Euripides, as

Aristotle, Heraclides, and Dicaerchus did. But I verily persuade myself

that their neglecting to take care for such provisions as these, and

finding all the other things they employed themselves in (as they use to

say of virtue) but insipid and dry, and being wholly set upon pleasure,

and the body no longer supplying them with it, give them occasion to

stoop to do things both mean and shameful in themselves and unbecoming

their age; as well when they refresh their memories with their former

pleasures and serve themselves of old ones (as it were) long since dead

and laid up in pickle for the purpose, when they cannot have fresh ones,

as when again they offer violence to nature by suscitating and inflaming

in their decayed bodies, as in cold embers, other new ones equally

senseless, they having not, it seems, their minds stored with any

congenial pleasure that is worth the rejoicing at.

As to the other delights of the mind, we have already treated of them,

as they occurred to us. But their aversedness and dislike to music,

that affords us so great delights and such charming satisfactions, a

man could not forget if he would, by reason of the inconsistency of what

Epicurus saith, when he pronounceth in his book called his Doubts that

his wise man ought to be a lover of public spectacles and to delight

above any other man in the music and shows of the Bacchanals; and yet

he will not admit of music problems or of the critical inquiries of

philologists, no, not so much as at a compotation. Yea, he advises such

princes as are lovers of the Muses rather to entertain themselves at

their feasts either with some narration of military adventures or with

the importune scurrilities of drolls and buffoons, than to engage in

disputes about music or in questions of poetry. For this very thing he

had the face to write in his treatise of Monarchy, as if he were writing

to Sardanapalus, or to Nanarus ruler of Babylon. For neither would a

Hiero nor an Attalus nor an Archelaus be persuaded to make a Euripides,

a Simonides, a Melanippides, a Crates, or a Diodotus rise up from their

tables, and to place such scaramuchios in their rooms as a Cardax, an

Agrias, or a Callias, or fellows like Thrasonides and Thrasyleon, to

make people disorder the house with hollowing and clapping. Had the

great Ptolemy, who was the first that formed a consort of musicians, but

met with these excellent and royal admonitions, would he not, think you,

have thus addressed himself to the Samians:--

O Muse, whence art thou thus maligned?

For certainly it can never belong to any Athenian to be in such enmity

and hostility with the Muses. But

No animal accurst by Jove

Music's sweet charms can ever love.

(Pindar, "Pythian," i. 25.)

What sayest thou now, Epicurus? Wilt thou get thee up betimes in the

morning, and go to the theatre to hear the harpers and flutists

play? But if a Theophrastus discourse at the table of Concords, or an

Aristoxenus of Varieties, or if an Aristophanes play the critic upon

Homer, wilt thou presently, for very dislike and abhorrence, clap both

thy hands upon thy ears? And do they not hereby make the Scythian king

Ateas more musical than this comes to, who, when he heard that admirable

flutist Ismenias, detained then by him as a prisoner of war, playing

upon the flute at a compotation, swore he had rather hear his own horse

neigh? And do they not also profess themselves to stand at an implacable

and irreconcilable defiance with whatever is generous and becoming? And

indeed what do they ever embrace or affect that is either genteel or

regardable, when it hath nothing of pleasure to accompany it? And would

it not far less affect a pleasurable way of living, to abhor perfumes

and odors, like beetles and vultures, than to shun and abhor the

conversation of learned, critics and musicians? For what flute or harp

ready tuned for a lesson, or

What sweetest concerts e'er with artful noise,

Warbled by softest tongue and best tuned voice,

ever gave Epicurus and Metrodorus such content as the disputes and

precepts about concerts gave Aristotle, Theophrastus, Hieronymus, and

Dicaerchus? And also the problems about flutes, rhythms, and harmonies;

as, for instance, why the longer of two flutes of the same longitude

should speak flatter?--why, if you raise the pipe, will all its notes

be sharp; and flat again, if you depress it?--and why, when clapped

to another, will it sound flatter; and sharper again, when taken from

it?--why also, if you scatter chaff or dust about the orchestra of a

theatre, will the sound be deadened?--and why, when one would have set

up a bronze Alexander for a frontispiece to a stage at Pella, did the

architect advise to the contrary, because it would spoil the actors'

voices? and why, of the several kinds of music, will the chromatic

diffuse and the harmonic compose the mind? But now the several humors

of poets, their differing turns and forms of style, and the solutions

of their difficult places, have conjoined with a sort of dignity and

politeness somewhat also that is extremely agreeable and charming;

insomuch that to me they seem to do what was once said by Xenophon, to

make a man even forget the joys of love, so powerful and overcoming is

the pleasure they bring us.

In this investigation these gentlemen have not the least share, nor

do they so much as pretend or desire to have any. But while they are

sinking and depressing their contemplative part into the body, and

dragging it down by their sensual and intemperate appetites, as by so

many weights of lead, they make themselves appear little better than

hostlers or graziers that still ply their cattle with hay, straw, or

grass, looking upon such provender as the properest and meetest food

for them. And is it not even thus they would swill the mind with the

pleasures of the body, as hogherds do their swine, while they will

not allow it can be gay any longer than it is hoping, experiencing,

or remembering something that refers to the body; but will not have it

either to receive or seek for any congenial joy or satisfaction

from within itself? Though what can be more absurd and unreasonable

than--when there are two things that go to make up the man, a body and

a soul, and the soul besides hath the perogative of governing--that the

body should have its peculiar, natural, and proper good, and the soul

none at all, but must sit gazing at the body and simper at its passions,

as if she were pleased and affected with them, though indeed she be all

the while wholly untouched and unconcerned, as having nothing of her own

to choose, desire, or take delight in? For they should either pull off

the vizor quite, and say plainly that man is all body (as some of them

do, that take away all mental being), or, if they will allow us to have

two distinct natures, they should then leave to each its proper good and

evil, agreeable and disagreeable; as we find it to be with our senses,

each of which is peculiarly adapted to its own sensible, though they all

very strangely intercommune one with another. Now the intellect is the

proper sense of the mind; and therefore that it should have no congenial

speculation, movement, or affection of its own, the attaining to which

should be matter of complacency to it, is the most irrational thing in

the world, if I have not, by Jove, unwittingly done the men wrong, and

been myself imposed upon by some that may perhaps have calumniated them.

Then I said to him: If we may be your judges, you have not; yea, we must

acquit you of having offered them the least indignity; and therefore

pray despatch the rest of your discourse with assurance. How! said

I, and shall not Aristodemus then succeed me, if you are tired out

yourself? Aristodemus said: With all my heart, when you are as much

tired as he is; but since you are yet in your vigor, pray make use of

yourself, my noble friend, and don't think to pretend weariness. Theon

then replied: What is yet behind, I must confess, is very easy; it being

but to go over the several pleasures contained in that part of life that

consists in action. Now themselves somewhere say that there is far more

satisfaction in doing than in receiving good; and good may be done many

times, it is true, by words, but the most and greatest part of good

consists in action, as the very name of beneficence tells us and they

themselves also attest. For you may remember, continued he, we heard

this gentleman tell us but now what words Epicurus uttered, and

what letters he sent to his friends, applauding and magnifying

Metrodorus,--how bravely and like a spark he quitted the city and

went down to the port to relieve Mithrus the Syrian,--and this, though

Metrodorus did not then do anything at all. What and how great then

may we presume the pleasures of Plato to have been, when Dion by the

measures he gave him deposed the tyrant Dionysius and set Sicily at

liberty? And what the pleasures of Aristotle, when he rebuilt his native

city Stagira, then levelled with the ground, and brought back its exiled

inhabitants? And what the pleasures of Theophrastus and of Phidias, when

they cut off the tyrants of their respective countries? For what need

a man recount to you, who so well know it, how many particular persons

they relieved, not by sending them a little wheat or a measure of meal

(as Epicurus did to some of his friends), but by procuring restoration

to the banished, liberty to the imprisoned, and restitution of wives and

children to those that had been bereft of them? But a man could not, if

he were willing, pass by the sottish stupidity of the man who, though

he tramples under foot and vilifies the great and generous actions of

Themistocles and Miltiades, yet writes these very words to his friends

about himself: "You have given a very gallant and noble testimony of

your care of me in the provision of corn you have made for me, and have

declared your affection to me by signs that mount to the very skies."

So that, should a man but take that poor parcel of corn out of the great

philosopher's epistle, it might seem to be the recital of some letter of

thanks for the delivery or preservation of all Greece or of the commons

of Athens.

We will now forbear to mention that Nature requires very large and

chargeable provisions to be made for accomplishing the pleasures of the

body; nor can the height of delicacy be had in black bread and lentil

pottage. But voluptuous and sensual appetites expect costly dishes,

Thasian wines, perfumed unguents, and varieties of pastry works,

And cakes by female hands wrought artfully,

Well steep'd in th' liquor of the gold-wing'd bee;

and besides all this, handsome young lassies too, such as Leontion,

Boidion, Hedia, and Nicedion, that were wont to roam about in Epicurus's

philosophic garden. But now such joys as suit the mind must undoubtedly

be grounded upon a grandeur of actions and a splendor of worthy deeds,

if men would not seem little, ungenerous, and puerile, but on the

contrary, bulky, firm, and brave. But for a man to be elated by

happiness, as Epicurus is, like sailors upon the festivals of Venus,

and to vaunt himself that, when he was sick of an ascites, he

notwithstanding called his friends together to certain collations and

grudged not his dropsy the addition of good liquor, and that, when he

called to remembrance the last words of Neocles, he was melted with a

peculiar sort of joy intermixed with tears,--no man in his right senses

would call these true joys or satisfactions. Nay, I will be bold to say

that, if such a thing as that they call a sardonic or grinning laughter

can happen to the mind, it is to be found in these artificial and crying

laughters. But if any will needs have them still called by the name of

joys and satisfactions, let him but yet think how far they are exceeded

by the pleasures that here ensue:--

Our counsels have proud Sparta's glory clipt;

and Stranger, this is his country Rome's great star;

and again this,

I know not which to guess thee, man or god.

Now when I set before my eyes the brave achievements of Thrasybulus and

Pelopidas, of Aristides engaged at Platea and Miltiades at Marathon, I

am here constrained with Herodotus to declare it my opinion, that in an

active state of life the pleasure far exceeds the glory. And Epaminondas

herein bears me witness also, when he saith (as is reported of him),

that the greatest satisfaction he ever received in his life was that

his father and mother had lived to see the trophy set up at Leuctra when

himself was general. Let us then compare with Epaminondas's Epicurus's

mother, rejoicing that she had lived to see her son cooping himself up

in a little garden, and getting children in common with Polyaenus upon

the strumpet of Cyzicus. As for Metrodorus's mother and sister, how

extravagantly rejoiced they were at his nuptials appears by the letters

he wrote to his brother in answer to his; that is, out of his own books.

Nay, they tell us bellowing that they have not only lived a life of

pleasure, but also exult and sing hymns in the praise of their own

living. Though, when our servants celebrate the festivals of Saturn or

go in procession at the time of the rural bacchanals, you would scarcely

brook the hollowing and din they make, if the intemperateness of their

joy and their insensibleness of decorum should make them act and speak

such things as these:--

Lean down, boy! why dost sit I let's tope like mad!

Here's belly-timber store; ne'er spare it, lad.

Straight these huzza like wild. One fills up drink;

Another plaits a wreath, and crowns the brink

O' th' teeming bowl. Then to the verdant bays

All chant rude carols in Apollo's praise;

While one the door with drunken fury smites,

Till he from bed his loving consort frights.

And are not Metrodorus's words something like to these when he writes to

his brother thus: It is none of our business to preserve the Greeks, or

to get them to bestow garlands upon us for our wit, but to eat well

and drink good wine, Timocrates, so as not to offend but pleasure our

stomachs. And he saith again, in some other place in the same epistles:

How gay and how assured was I, when I had once learned of Epicurus

the true way of gratifying my stomach; for, believe me, philosopher

Timocrates, our prime good lies at the stomach.

In brief, these men draw out the dimensions of their pleasures like

a circle, about the stomach as a centre. And the truth is, it is

impossible for those men ever to participate of generous and princely

joy, such as enkindles a height of spirit in us and sends forth to all

mankind an unmade hilarity and calm serenity, that have taken up a sort

of life that is confined, unsocial, inhuman, and uninspired towards the

esteem of the world and the love of mankind. For the soul of man is not

an abject, little, and ungenerous thing, nor doth it extend its desires

(as polyps do their claws) unto eatables only,--yea, these are in an

instant of time taken off by the least plenitude, but when its efforts

towards what is brave and generous and the honors and caresses that

accrue therefrom are now in their consummate vigor this life's duration

cannot limit them, but the desire of glory and the love of mankind grasp

at whole eternity, and wrestle with such actions and charms as bring

with them an ineffable pleasure, and such as good men, though never so

fain, cannot decline, they meeting and accosting them on all sides and

surrounding them about, while their being beneficial to many occasions

joy to themselves.

As he passes through the throngs in the city,

All gaze upon him as some deity.

("Odyssey," viii. 173.)

For he that can so affect and move other men as to fill them with joy

and rapture, and to make them long to touch him and salute him, cannot

but appear even to a blind man to possess and enjoy very extraordinary

satisfactions in himself. And hence it comes that such men are both

indefatigable and undaunted in serving the public, and we still hear

some such words from them

Thy father got thee for the common good;

and

Let's not give off to benefit mankind.

But what need I instance in those that are consummately good? For if to

one of the middling rank of bad men, when he is just a-dying, he that

hath the power over him (whether his god or prince) should but allow one

hour more, upon condition that, after he hath spent that either in some

generous action or in sensual enjoyment, he should then presently die,

who would in this time choose rather to accompany with Lais or drink

Ariusion wine, than to despatch Archias and restore the Athenians to

their liberties? For my part I believe none would. For I see that even

common sword-players, if they are not utter brutes and savages, but

Greek born, when they are to enter the list, though there be many and

very costly dishes set before them, yet take more content in employing

their time in commanding their poor wives to some of their friends,

yea, and in conferring freedom on their slaves, than in gratifying their

stomachs. But should the pleasures of the body be allowed to have some

extraordinary matter in them, this would yet be common to men of action

and business.

For they can eat good meat, and red wine drink,

(See "Iliad," v. 341.)

aye, and entertain themselves with their friends, and perhaps with a

greater relish too, after their engagements and hard services,--as

did Alexander and Agesilaus, and (by Jove) Phocion and Epaminondas

too,--than these gentlemen who anoint themselves by the fireside, and

are gingerly rocked about the streets in sedans. Yea, those make but

small account of such pleasures as these, as being comprised in those

greater ones. For why should a man mention Epaminondas's denying to sup

with one, when he saw the preparations made were above the man's

estate, but frankly saying to his friend, "I thought you had intended a

sacrifice and not a debauch," when Alexander himself refused Queen Ada's

cooks, telling her he had better ones of his own, to wit, travelling

by night for his dinner, and a light dinner for his supper, and when

Philoxenus writing to him about some handsome boys, and desiring to know

of him whether he would have him buy them for him, was within a small

matter of being discharged his office for it? And yet who might better

have them than he? But as Hippocrates saith that of two pains the lesser

is forgot in the greater, so the pleasures that accrue from action and

the love of glory, while they cheer and refresh the mind, do by their

transcendency and grandeur obliterate and extinguish the inferior

satisfactions of the body.

If, then, the remembering of former good things (as they affirm) be that

which most contributes to a pleasurable living, not one of us will then

credit Epicurus when he, tells us that, while he was dying away in the

midst of the strongest agonies and distempers, he yet bore himself up

with the memory of the pleasures he formerly enjoyed. For a man may

better see the resemblance of his own face in a troubled deep or a

storm, than a smooth and smiling remembrance of past pleasure in a body

tortured with such lancing and rending pains. But now the memories of

past actions no man can put from him that would. For did Alexander,

think you, (or indeed could he possibly) forget the fight at Arbela?

Or Pelopidas the tyrant Leontiadas? Or Themistocles the engagement at

Salamis? For the Athenians to this very day keep an annual festival for

the battle at Marathon, and the Thebans for that at Leuctra; and so, by

Jove, do we ourselves (as you very well know) for that which Daiphantus

gained at Hyampolis, and all Phocis is filled with sacrifices and

public honors. Nor is there any of us that is better satisfied with

what himself hath either eaten or drunk than he is with what they

have achieved. It is very easy then to imagine what great content,

satisfaction, and joy accompanied the authors of these actions in their

lifetime, when the very memory of them hath not yet after five hundred

years and more lost its rejoicing power. The truth is, Epicurus himself

allows there are some pleasures derived from fame. And indeed why should

he not, when he himself had such a furious lechery and wriggling after

glory as made him not only to disown his masters and scuffle about

syllables and accents with his fellow-pedant Democritus (whose

principles he stole verbatim), and to tell his disciples there never was

a wise man in the world besides himself, but also to put it in

writing how Colotes performed adoration to him, as he was one day

philosophizing, by touching his knees, and that his own brother Neocles

was used from a child to say, "There neither is, nor ever was in the

world, a wiser man than Epicurus," and that his mother had just so many

atoms within her as, when coming together, must have produced a complete

wise man? May not a man then--as Callicratidas once said of the Athenian

admiral Conon, that he whored the sea as well say of Epicurus that

he basely and covertly forces and ravishes Fame, by not enjoying her

publicly but ruffling and debauching her in a corner? For as men's

bodies are oft necessitated by famine, for want of other food, to prey

against nature upon themselves, a like mischief to this does vainglory

create in men's minds, forcing them, when they hunger after praise and

cannot obtain it from other men, at last to commend themselves.

And do not they then that stand so well affected towards applause and

fame themselves own they cast away very extraordinary pleasures,

when they decline, magistrature, public offices, and the favor and

confidences of princes, from whom Democritus once said the grandest

blessings of human life are derived? For he will never induce any mortal

to believe, that he that could so highly value and please himself with

the attestation of his brother Neocles and the adoration of his friend

Colotes would not, were he clapped by all the Greeks at the Olympiads,

go quite out of his wits and even hollow for joy, or rather indeed be

elated in the manner spoken of by Sophocles,

Puffed like the down of a gray-headed thistle.

If it be a pleasing thing then to be of a good fame, it is on the

contrary afflictive to be of an ill one; and it is most certain that

nothing in the world can be more infamous than want of friendship,

idleness, atheism, debauchery, and negligence. Now these are looked upon

by all men except themselves as inseparable companions of their party.

But unjustly, some one may say. Be it so then; for we consider not now

the truth of the charge, but what fame and reputation they are of in the

world. And we shall forbear at present to mention the many books that

have been written to defame them, and the blackening decrees made

against them by several republics; for that would look like bitterness.

But if the answers of oracles, the providence of the gods, and the

tenderness and affection of parents to their issue,--if civil policy,

military order, and the office of magistracy be things to be looked

upon as deservedly esteemed and celebrated, it must of necessity then

be allowed also, that they that tell us it is none of their business to

preserve the Greeks, but they must eat and drink so as not to offend

but pleasure their stomachs, are base and ignominious persons, and that

their being reputed such must needs extremely humble them and make their

lives untoward to them, if they take honor and a good name for any part

of their satisfaction.

When Theon had thus spoken, we thought good to break up our walk to rest

us awhile (as we were wont to do) upon the benches. Nor did we continue

any long space in our silence at what was spoken; for Zeuxippus, taking

his hint from what had been said, spake to us: Who will make up that of

the discourse which is yet behind? For it hath not yet received its due

conclusion; and this gentleman, by mentioning divination and providence,

did in my opinion suggest as much to us; for these people boast that

these very things contribute in no way to the providing of their lives

with pleasure, serenity, and assurance; so that there must be something

said to these too. Aristodemus subjoined then and said: As to pleasure,

I think there hath been enough said already to evince that, supposing

their doctrine to be successful and to attain its own design, it yet

doth but ease us of fear and a certain superstitious persuasion but

helps us not to any comfort or joy from the gods at all; nay, while it

brings us to such a state as to be neither disquieted nor pleased with

them, it doth but render us in the same manner affected towards them

as we are towards the Scythians or Hyrcanians, from whom we look for

neither good nor harm. But if something more must be added to what hath

been already spoken, I think I may very well take it from themselves.

And in the first place, they quarrel extremely with those that would

take away all sorrowing, weeping, and sighing for the death of friends,

and tell them that such unconcernedness as arrives to an insensibility

proceeds from some other worse cause, to wit, inhumanity, excessive

vainglory, or prodigious fierceness, and that therefore it would be

better to be a little concerned and affected, yea, and to liquor one's

eyes and be melted, with other pretty things of the like kind, which

they use artificially to affect and counterfeit, that they may be

thought tender and loving-hearted people. For just in this manner

Epicurus expressed himself upon the occasion of the death of Hegesianax,

when he wrote to Dositheus the father and to Pyrson the brother of the

deceased person; for I fortuned very lately to run over his epistles.

And I say, in imitation of them, that atheism is no less an evil than

inhumanity and vainglory, and into this they would lead us who take away

with God's anger the comfort we might derive from him. For it would

be much better for us to have something of the unsuiting passion of

dauntedness and fear conjoined and intermixed with our sentiments of

a deity, than while we fly from it, to leave ourselves neither hope,

content, nor assurance in the enjoyment of our good things nor any

recourse to God in our adversity and misfortunes.

We ought, it is true, to remove superstition from the persuasion we

have of the gods, as we would the gum from our eyes; but if that be

impossible, we must not root out and extinguish with it the belief which

the most have of the gods; nor is that a dismaying and sour one either,

as these gentlemen feign, while they libel and abuse the blessed

Providence, representing her as a witch or as some fell and tragic fury.

Yea, I must tell you, there are some in the world that fear God in an

excess, for whom yet it would not be better not so to fear him. For,

while they dread him as a governor that is gentle to the good and severe

to the bad, and are by this one fear, which makes them not to need many

others, freed from doing ill and brought to keep their wickedness with

them in quiet and (as it were) in an enfeebled languor, they come hereby

to have less disquiet than those that indulge the practice of it and are

rash and daring in it, and then presently after fear and repent of it.

Now that disposition of mind which the greater and ignorant part of

mankind, that are not utterly bad, are of towards God, hath, it is

very true, conjoined with the regard and honor they pay him, a kind of

anguish and astonished dread, which is also called superstition; but

ten thousand times more and greater is the good hope, the true joy,

that attend it, which both implore and receive the whole benefit of

prosperity and good success from the gods only. And this is manifest by

the greatest tokens that can be; for neither do the discourses of those

that wait at the temples, nor the good times of our solemn festivals,

nor any other actions or sights more recreate and delight us than what

we see and do about the gods ourselves, while we assist at the public

ceremonies, and join in the sacred balls, and attend at the sacrifices

and initiations. For the mind is not then sorrowful depressed, and

heavy, as if she were approaching certain tyrants or cruel torturers;

but on the contrary, where she is most apprehensive and fullest

persuaded the divinity is present, there she most of all throws off

sorrows, tears, and pensiveness, and lets herself loose to what is

pleasing and agreeable, to the very degree of tipsiness, frolic, and

laughter. In amorous concerns, as the poet said once,

When old man and old wife think of love's fires,

Their frozen breasts will swell with new desires;

but now in the public processions and sacrifices not only the old man

and the old wife, nor yet the poor and mean man only, but also

The dusty thick-legged drab that turns the mill,

and household-slaves and day-laborers, are strangely elevated and

transported with mirth and joviality. Rich men as well as princes are

used at certain times to make public entertainments and to keep open

houses; but the feasts they make at the solemnities and sacrifices, when

they now apprehend their minds to approach nearest the divinity,

have conjoined with the honor and veneration they pay him a much more

transcending pleasure and satisfaction. Of this, he that hath renounced

God's providence hath not the least share; for what recreates and cheers

us at the festivals is not the store of good wine and roast meat, but

the good hope and persuasion that God is there present and propitious

to us, and kindly accepts of what we do. From some of our festivals

we exclude the flute and garland; but if God be not present at the

sacrifice, as the solemnity of the banquet, the rest is but unhallowed,

unfeast-like, and uninspired. Indeed the whole is but ungrateful and

irksome to such a man; for he asks for nothing at all, but only acts his

prayers and adorations for fear of the public, and utters expressions

contradictory to his philosophy. And when he sacrifices, he stands by

and looks upon the priest as he kills the offering but as he doth upon a

butcher; and when he hath done, he goes his way, saying with Menander,

To bribe the gods I sacrificed my best,

But they ne'er minded me nor my request.

For so Epicurus would have us arrange ourselves, and neither to envy nor

to incur the hatred of the common herd by doing ourselves with disgust

what others do with delight. For, as Evenus saith,

No man can love what he is made to do.

For which very reason they think the superstitious are not pleased

in their minds but in fear while they attend at the sacrifices and

mysteries; though they themselves are in no better condition, if they

do the same things our of fear, and partake not either of as great good

hope as the others do, but are only fearful and uneasy lest they should

come to be discovered as cheating and abusing the public, upon whose

account it is that they compose the books they write about the gods and

the divine nature,

Involved, with nothing truly said.

But all around enveloped;

hiding out of fear the real opinions they contain.

And now, after the two former ranks of ill and common men, we will in

the third place consider the best sort and most beloved of the gods,

and what great satisfactions they receive from their clean and generous

sentiments of the deity, to wit, that he is the prince of all good

things and the parent of all things brave, and can no more do an

unworthy thing than he can be made to suffer it. For he is good, and he

that is good can upon no account fall into envy, fear, anger, or hatred;

neither is it proper to a hot thing to cool, but to heat; nor to a

good thing to do harm. Now anger is by nature at the farthest distance

imaginable from complacency, and spleenishness from placidness, and

animosity and turbulence from humanity and kindness. For the latter

of these proceed from generosity and fortitude, but the former from

impotency and baseness. The deity is not therefore constrained by either

anger or kindnesses; but that is because it is natural to it to be kind

and aiding, and unnatural to be angry and hurtful. But the great Jove,

whose mansion is in heaven, is the first that descends downwards and

orders all things and takes the care of them. But of the other gods

one is surnamed the Distributor, and another the Mild, and a third the

Averter of Evil. And according to Pindar,

Phoebus was by mighty Jove designed

Of all the gods to be to man most kind.

And Diogenes saith, that all things are the gods', and friends have all

things common, and good men are the gods' friends; and therefore it is

impossible either that a man beloved of the gods should not be happy,

or that a wise and a just man should not be beloved of the gods. Can

you think then that they that take away Providence need any other

chastisement, or that they have not a sufficient one already, when they

root out of themselves such vast satisfaction and joy as we that

stand thus affected towards the deity have? Metrodorus, Polyaenus, and

Aristobulus were the confidence and rejoicing of Epicurus; the

better part of whom he all his lifetime either attended upon in their

sicknesses or lamented at their deaths. As did Lycurgus, when he was

saluted by the Delphic prophetess,

Dear friend to heavenly Jove and all the gods.

And did Socrates when he believed that a certain divinity was used out

of kindness to discourse him, and Pindar when he heard Pan sing one

of the sonnets he had composed, but a little rejoice, think you? Or

Phormio, when he thought he had treated Castor and Pollux at his house?

Or Sophocles, when he entertained Aesculapius, as both he himself

believed, and others too, that thought the same with him by reason of

the apparition that then happened? What opinion Hermogenes had of the

gods is well worth the recounting in his very own words. "For these

gods," saith he, "who know all things and can do all things, are so

friendly and loving to me that, because they take care of me, I never

escape them either by night or by day, wherever I go or whatever I am

about. And because they know beforehand what issue everything will have,

they signify it to me by sending angels, voices, dreams, and presages."

Very amiable things must those be that come to us from the gods; but

when these very things come by the gods too, this is what occasions vast

satisfaction and unspeakable assurance, a sublimity of mind and a joy

that, like a smiling brightness, doth as it were gild over our good

things with a glory. But now those that are persuaded otherwise obstruct

the very sweetest part of their prosperity, and leave themselves nothing

to turn to in their adversity; but when they are in distress, look only

to this one refuge and port, dissolution and insensibility; just as

if in a storm or tempest at sea, some one should, to hearten the rest,

stand up and say to them: Gentlemen, the ship hath never a pilot in it,

nor will Castor and Pollux come themselves to assuage the violence of

the beating waves or to lay the swift careers of the winds; yet I can

assure you there is nothing at all to be dreaded in all this, for the

vessel will be immediately swallowed up by the sea, or else will very

quickly fall off and be dashed in pieces against the rocks. For this

is Epicurus's way of discourse to persons under grievous distempers

and excessive pains. Dost thou hope for any good from the gods for thy

piety? It is thy vanity; for the blessed and incorruptible Being is not

constrained by either angers or kindnesses. Dost thou fancy something

better after this life than what thou hast here? Thou dost but deceive

thyself; for what is dissolved hath no sense, and that which hath no

sense is nothing to us. Aye; but how comes it then, my good friend, that

you bid me eat and be merry? Why, by Jove, because he that is in a great

storm cannot be far off a shipwreck; and your extreme danger will soon

land you upon Death's strand. Though yet a passenger at sea, when he

is got off from a shattered ship, will still buoy himself up with some

little hope that he may drive his body to some shore and get out by

swimming; but now the poor soul, according to these men's philosophy,

Is ne'er more seen without the hoary main.

("Odyssey," v. 410.)

Yea, she presently evaporates, disperses, and perishes, even before the

body itself; so that it seems her great and excessive rejoicing must

be only for having learned this one sage and divine maxim, that all her

misfortunes will at last determine in her own destruction, dissolution,

and annihilation.

But (said he, looking upon me) I should be impertinent, should I say

anything upon this subject, when we have heard you but now discourse

so fully against those that would persuade us that Epicurus's doctrine

about the soul renders men more disposed and better pleased to die

than Plato's doth. Zeuxippus therefore subjoined and said: And must our

present debate be left then unfinished because of that? Or shall we

be afraid to oppose that divine oracle to Epicurus? No, by no means, I

said; and Empedocles tells us that

What's very good claims to be heard twice.

Therefore we must apply ourselves again to Theon; for I think he was

present at our former discourse; and besides, he is a young man, and

needs not fear being charged by these young gentlemen with having a bad

memory.

Then Theon, like one constrained, said: Well then, if you will

needs have me to go on with the discourse, I will not do as you did,

Aristodemus. For you were shy of repeating what this gentleman spoke,

but I shall not scruple to make use of what you have said; for I think

indeed you did very well divide mankind into three ranks; the first of

wicked and very bad men, the second of the vulgar and common sort, and

the third of good and wise men. The wicked and bad sort then, while they

dread any kind of divine vengeance and punishment at all, and are by

this deterred from doing mischief, and thereby enjoy the greater quiet,

will live both in more pleasure and in less disturbance for it. And

Epicurus is of opinion that the only proper means to keep men from doing

ill is the fear of punishments. So that we should cram them with more

and more superstition still, and raise up against them terrors, chasms,

frights, and surmises, both from heaven and earth, if their being

amazed with such things as these will make them become the more tame and

gentle. For it is more for their benefit to be restrained from criminal

actions by the fear of what comes after death, than to commit them and

then to live in perpetual danger and fear.

As to the vulgar sort, besides their fear of what is in hell, the hope

they have conceived of an eternity from the tales and fictions of the

ancients, and their great desire of being, which is both the first and

the strongest of all, exceed in pleasure and sweet content of mind that

childish dread. And therefore, when they lose their children, wives,

or friends, they would rather have them be somewhere and still remain,

though in misery, than that they should be quite destroyed, dissolved,

and reduced to nothing. And they are pleased when they hear it said of

a dying person, that he goes away or departs, and such other words as

intimate death to be the soul's remove and not destruction. And they

sometimes speak thus:

But I'll even there think on my dearest friend;

("Iliad," xxii. 390.)

and thus:--

What's your command to Hector? Let me know;

And to your dear old Priam shall I go?

(Euripides, "Hecuba," 422.)

And (there arising hereupon an erroneous deviation) they are the

better pleased when they bury with their departed friends such arms,

implements, or clothes as were most familiar to them in their lifetime;

as Minos did the Cretan flutes with Glaucus,

Made of the shanks of a dead brindled fawn.

And if they do but imagine they either ask or desire anything of them,

they are glad when they give it them. Thus Periander burnt his queen's

attire with her, because he thought she had asked for it and complained

she was a-cold. Nor doth an Aeacus, an Ascalaphus, or an Acheron much

disorder them whom they have often gratified with balls, shows, and

music of every sort. But now all men shrink from that face of death

which carries with it insensibility, oblivion, and extinction of

knowledge, as being dismal, grim, and dark. And they are discomposed

when they hear it said of any one, he is perished, or he is gone or he

is no more; and they show great uneasiness when they hear such words as

these:--

Go to the wood-clad earth he must,

And there lie shrivelled into dust,

And ne'er more laugh or drink, or hear

The charming sounds of flute or lyre;

and these:--

But from our lips the vital spirit fled

Returns no more to wake the silent dead.

("Iliad," ix. 408.)

Wherefore they must needs cut the very throats of them that shall with

Epicurus tell them, We men were born once for all, and we cannot be born

twice, but our not being must last forever. For this will bring them to

slight their present good as little, or rather indeed as nothing at all

compared with everlastingness, and therefore to let it pass unenjoyed

and to become wholly negligent of virtue and action, as men disheartened

and brought to a contempt of themselves, as being but as it were of one

day's continuance and uncertain, and born for no considerable purpose.

For insensibility, dissolution, and the conceit that what hath no sense

is nothing to us, do not at all abate the fear of death, but rather help

to confirm it; for this very thing is it that nature most dreads,--

But may you all return to mould and wet,

(Ibid. vii. 99.)

to wit, the dissolution of the soul into what is without knowledge or

sense. Now, while Epicurus would have this to be a separation into

atoms and void, he doth but further cut off all hope of immortality; to

compass which (I can scarce refrain from saying) all men and women would

be well contented to be worried by Cerberus, and to carry water into

the tub full of holes, so they might but continue in being and not be

exterminated. Though (as I said before) there are not very many that

stand in fear of these things, they being but the tenets of old women

and the fabulous stories of mothers and nurses,--and even they that do

fear them yet believe that certain rites of initiation and purgation

will relieve them, by which after they are cleansed they shall play and

dance in hell forever, in company with those that have the privilege of

a bright light, clear air, and the use of speech,--yet to be deprived of

living disturbs all both young and old. We

Impatient love the light that shines on earth,

(Euripides, "Hippolytus," 193)

as Euripides saith. Nor are we easy or without regret when we hear

this:--

Him speaking thus th' eternal brightness leaves,

Where night the wearied steeds of day receives.

And therefore it is very plain that with the belief of immortality they

take away the sweetest and greatest hopes the vulgar sort have. And what

shall we then think they take away from the good and those that have led

pious and just lives, who expect no ill after dying, but on the contrary

most glorious and divine things? For, in the first place, athletes

are not used to receive the garland before they have performed their

exercises, but after they have contested and proved victorious; in like

manner is it with those that are persuaded that good men have the prize

of their conquests after this life is ended; it is marvellous to think

to what a pitch of grandeur their virtue raises their spirits upon the

contemplation of those hopes, among the which this is one, that they

shall one day see those men that are now insolent by reason of their

wealth and power, and that foolishly flout at their betters, undergo

just punishment. In the next place, none of the lovers of truth and the

contemplation of being have here their fill of them; they having but a

watery and puddled reason to speculate with, as it were, through the

fog and mist of the body; and yet they still look upwards like birds,

as ready to take their flight to the spacious and bright region, and

endeavor to make their souls expedite and light from things mortal,

using philosophy as a study for death. Thus I account death a truly

great and accomplished good thing; the soul being to live there a

real life, which here lives not a waking life, but suffers things most

resembling dreams. If then (as Epicurus saith) the remembrance of a

dead friend be a thing every way complacent; we may easily from thence

imagine how great a joy they deprive themselves of who think they do but

embrace and pursue the phantoms and shades of their deceased familiars,

that have in them neither knowledge nor sense, but who never expect

to be with them again, or to see their dear father and dear mother and

sweet wife, nor have any hopes of that familiarity and dear converse

they have that think of the soul with Pythagoras, Plato, and Homer. Now

what their sort of passion is like to was hinted at by Homer, when he

threw into the midst of the soldiers, as they were engaged, the shade

of Aeneas, as if he had been dead, and afterwards again presented his

friends with him himself,

Coming alive and well, as brisk as ever;

at which, he saith,

They all were overjoyed.

("Iliad," v. 514 and 515)

And should not we then,--when reason shows us that a real converse with

persons departed this life may be had, and that he that loves may both

feel and be with the party that affects and loves him,--relinquish these

men that cannot so much as cast off all those airy shades and outside

barks for which they are all their time in lamentation and fresh

afflictions?

Moreover, they that look upon death as the commencement of another and

better life, if they enjoy good things, are the better pleased with

them, as expecting much greater hereafter; but if they have not things

here to their minds, they do not much grumble at it, but the hopes of

those good and excellent things that are after death contain in them

such ineffable pleasures and expectances, that they wipe off and wholly

obliterate every defect and every offence from the mind, which, as on

a road or rather indeed in a short deviation out of the road, bears

whatever befalls it with great ease and indifference. But now, as to

those to whom life ends in insensibility and dissolution,--death brings

to them no removal of evils, though it is afflicting in both conditions,

yet is it more so to those that live prosperously than to such as

undergo adversity? For it cuts the latter but from an uncertain hope of

doing better hereafter; but it deprives the former of a certain good, to

wit, their pleasurable living. And as those medicinal potions that are

not grateful to the palate but yet necessary give sick men ease, but

rake and hurt the well; just so, in my opinion, doth the philosophy

of Epicurus; it promises to those that live miserably no happiness in

death, and to those that do well an utter extinction and dissolution of

the mind, while it quite obstructs the comfort and solace of the grave

and wise and those that abound with good things, by throwing them down

from a happy living into a deprivation of both life and being. From

hence then it is manifest, that the contemplation of the loss of good

things will afflict us in as great a measure as either the firm hope or

present enjoyment of them delights us.

Yea, themselves tell us, that the thought of future dissolution leaves

them one most assured and complacent good, freedom from anxious surmises

of incessant and endless evils, and that Epicurus's doctrine effects

this by stopping the fear of death through the soul's dissolution. If

then deliverance from the expectation of infinite evils be a matter of

greatest complacence, how comes it not to be afflictive to be bereft

of eternal good things and to miss of the highest and most consummate

felicity? For not to be can be good for neither condition, but is on the

contrary both against nature and ungrateful to all that have a being.

But those being eased of the evils of life through the evils of death

have, it is very true, the want of sense to comfort them, while they, as

it were, make their escape from life. But, on the other hand, they that

change from good things to nothing seem to me to have the most dismaying

end of all, it putting a period to their happiness. For Nature doth not

fear insensibility as the entrance upon some new thing, but because it

is the privation of our present good things. For to declare that the

destruction of all that we call ours toucheth us not is untrue for it

toucheth us already by the very anticipation. And insensibility afflicts

not those that are not, but those that are, when they think what

damage they shall sustain by it in the loss of their being and in being

suffered never to emerge from nothingness. Wherefore it is neither

the dog Cerberus nor the river Cocytus that has made our fear of death

boundless; but the threatened danger of not being, representing it as

impossible for such as are once extinct to shift back again into being.

For we cannot be born twice, and our not being must last forever; as

Epicurus speaks. For if our end be in not being, and that be infinite

and unalterable, then hath privation of good found out an eternal evil,

to wit, a never ending insensibleness. Herodotus was much wiser, when he

said that God, having given men a taste of the delights of life, seems

to be envious, (Herodotus, vii. 46) and especially to those that conceit

themselves happy, to whom pleasure is but a bait for sorrow, they being

but permitted to taste of what they must be deprived of. For what solace

or fruition or exultation would not the perpetual injected thought of

the soul's being dispersed into infinity, as into a certain huge and

vast ocean, extinguish and quell in those that found their amiable good

and beatitude in pleasure? But if it be true (as Epicurus thinks it is)

that most men die in very acute pain, then is the fear of death in all

respects inconsolable; it bringing us through evils unto a deprivation

of good.

And yet they are never wearied with their brawling and dunning of all

persons to take the escape of evil for a good, no longer to repute

privation of good for an evil. But they still confess what we have

asserted, that death hath in it nothing of either good hope or solace,

but that all that is complacent and good is then wholly extinguished;

at which time those men look for many amiable, great, and divine things,

that conceive the minds of men to be unperishable and immortal, or at

least to go about in certain long revolutions of times, being one while

upon earth and another while in heaven, until they are at last dissolved

with the universe and then, together with the sun and moon, sublimed

into an intellective fire. So large a field and one of so great

pleasures Epicurus wholly cuts off, when he destroys (as hath been

said) the hopes and graces we should derive from the gods, and by that

extinguishes both in our speculative capacity the desire of knowledge,

and in our active the love of glory, and confines and abases our nature

to a poor narrow thing, and that not cleanly neither, to wit, the

content the mind receives by the body, as if it were capable of no

higher good than the escape of evil.

END OF ONE--------

THAT A PHILOSOPHER OUGHT CHIEFLY TO CONVERSE WITH GREAT MEN.

The resolution which you have taken to enter into the friendship

and familiarity of Sorcanus, that by the frequent opportunities of

conversing with him you may cultivate and improve a soil which gives

such early promises of a plentiful harvest, is an undertaking which will

not only oblige his relations and friends, but rebound very much to the

advantage of the public; and (notwithstanding the peevish censures of

some morose or ignorant people) it is so far from being an argument

of an aspiring vainglorious temper, that it shows you to be a lover of

virtue and good manners, and a zealous promoter of the common interest

of mankind.

They themselves are rather to be accused of an indirect but more

vehement sort of ambition, who would not upon any terms be found in

the company or so much as be seen to give a civil salute to a person

of quality. For how unreasonable would it be to enforce a well-disposed

young gentleman, and one who needs the direction of a wise governor, to

such complaints as these: "Would that I might become from a Pericles or

a Cato to a cobbler like Simon or a grammarian like Dionysius, that I

might like them talk with such a man as Socrates, and sit by him."

So far, I am sure, was Aristo of Chios from being of their humor,

that when he was censured for exposing and prostituting the dignity of

philosophy by his freedom to all comers, he answered, that he could wish

that Nature had given understanding to wild beasts, that they too might

be capable of being his hearers. Shall we then deny that privilege to

men of interest and power, which this good man would have communicated

(if it had been possible) to the brute beasts? But these men have

taken a false notion of philosophy, they make it much like the art of

statuary, whose business it is to carve out a lifeless image in the most

exact figure and proportion, and then to raise it upon its pedestal,

where it is to continue forever. The true philosophy is of a quite

different nature; it is a spring and principle of motion wherever it

comes; it makes men active and industrious, it sets every wheel and

faculty a-going, it stores our minds with axioms and rules by which to

make a sound judgment, it determines the will to the choice of what

is honorable and just; and it wings all our faculties to the swiftest

prosecution of it. It is accompanied with an elevation and nobleness of

mind, joined with a coolness and sweetness of behavior, and backed

with a becoming assurance and inflexible resolution. And from this

diffusiveness of the nature of good it follows, that the best and most

accomplished men are inclined to converse with persons of the highest

condition. Indeed a physician if he have any good nature and sense of

honor, would be more ready to cure an eye which is to see and to watch

for a great many thousands, than that of a private person; how much more

then ought a philosopher to form and fashion, to rectify and cure the

soul of such a one, who is (if I may so express it) to inform the body

politic,--who is to think and understand for so many others, to be in

so great measure the rule of reason, the standard of law, and model of

behavior, by which all the rest will square and direct their actions?

Suppose a man to have a talent at finding out springs and contriving of

aqueducts (a piece of skill for which Hercules and other of the ancients

are much celebrated in history), surely he could not so satisfactorily

employ himself in sinking a well or deriving water to some private

seat or contemptible cottage, as in supplying conduits to some fair and

populous city, in relieving an army just perishing with thirst, or in

refreshing and adorning with fountains and cool streams the beautiful

gardens of some glorious monarch. There is a passage of Homer very

pertinent to this purpose, in which he calls Minos [Greek text], which,

as Plato interprets it, signifies THE DISCIPLE AND COMPANION OF JUPITER.

For it were beneath his dignity indeed to teach private men, such as

care only for a family or indulge their useless speculations; but

kings are scholars worthy the tuition of a god, who, when they are well

advised, just, good, and magnanimous, never fail to procure the peace

and prosperity of all their subjects. The naturalists tell us that the

eryngium hath such a property with it, that if one of the flock do but

taste it, all the rest will stand stock still in the same place till the

shepherd hath taken it out of its mouth. Such swiftness of action does

it have, pervading and inserting itself in everything near it, as if it

were fire. The effects of philosophy, however, are different according

to the difference of inclinations in men. If indeed it lights on one who

loves a dull and inactive sort of life, that makes himself the centre

and the little conveniences of life the circumference of all his

thoughts, such a one does contract the sphere of her activity, so that

having only made easy and comfortable the life of a single person, it

fails and dies with him; but when it finds a man of a ruling genius,

one fitted for conversation and able to grapple with the difficulties

of public business, if it once possess him with principles of honesty,

honor, and religion, it takes a compendious method, by doing good to

one, to oblige a great part of mankind. Such was the effect of the

intercourse of Anaxagoras with Pericles, of Plato with Dion, and of

Pythagoras with the principal statesmen of all Italy. Cato himself took

a voyage, when he had the concern of an expedition lying upon him, to

see and hear Athenodorus; and Scipio sent for Panaetius, when he was

commissioned by the senate "to take a survey alike of the habits of men

good and bad," ("Odyssey," xvii. 487.) as Posidonius says. Now what

a pretty sort of return would it have been in Panaetius to send word

back,--"If indeed you were in a private capacity, John a Nokes or John

a Stiles, that had a mind to get into some obscure corner or cell, to

state cases and resolve syllogisms, I should very gladly have accepted

your invitation; but now, because you are the son of Paulus AEmilius who

was twice consul, and grandson of that Scipio who was surnamed from

his conquest of Hannibal and Africa, I cannot with honor hold any

conversation with you!"

The objections which they bring from the two kinds of discourse, one of

which is mental, the other like the gift of Mercury expressed in words

or interpretative of the former, are so frivolous, that they are best

answered by laughter or silence; and we may quote the old saying, "I

knew this before Theognis arose." However, thus much shall be added,

that the end of them both is friendship,--in the first case with

ourselves, in the second with another. For he that hath attained to

virtue by the methods of philosophy hath his mind all in tune and good

temper; he is not struck with those reproaches of conscience, which

cause the acutest sense of pain and are the natural punishments of

our follies; but he enjoys (the great prerogative of a good man) to be

always easy and in amity with himself.

No factious lusts reason's just power control,

Nor kindle civil discord in his soul.

His passion does not stand in defiance to his reason, nor do his

reasonings cross and thwart one the other, but he is always consistent

with himself. But the very joys of wicked men are tumultuary and

confused, like those who dwell in the borders of two great empires at

variance, always insecure, and in perpetual alarms; whilst a good man

enjoys an uninterrupted peace and serenity of mind, which excels the

other not only in duration, but in sense of pleasure too. As for the

other sort of converse, that which consists in expression of itself to

others, Pindar says very well, that it was not mercenary in old time,

nor indeed is it so now; but by the baseness and ambition of a few it

is made use of to serve their poor secular interests. For if the poets

represent Venus herself as much offended with those who make a trade and

traffic of the passion of love, how much more reasonably may we suppose

that Urania and Clio and Calliope have an indignation against those who

set learning and philosophy to sale? Certainly the gifts and endowments

of the Muses should be privileged from such mean considerations.

If indeed some have made fame and reputation one of the ends of their

studies, they used it only as an instrument to get friends; since we

find by common observation that men only praise those whom they love. If

they sought its own praise, they were as much mistaken as Ixion when he

embraced a cloud instead of Juno; for there is nothing so fleeting, so

changeable, and so inconstant as popular applause; it is but a pompous

shadow, and hath no manner of solidity and duration in it. But a wise

man, if he design to engage in business and matters of state, will

so far aim at fame and popularity as that he may be better enabled to

benefit others; for it is a difficult and very unpleasant task to do

good to those who are disaffected to our persons. It is the good opinion

men have of us which disposes men to give credit to our doctrine. As

light is a greater good to those who see others by it than to those

who only are seen, so is honor of a greater benefit to those who are

sensible of it than to those whose glory is admired. But even one who

withdraws himself from the noise of the world, who loves privacy and

indulges his own thoughts, will show that respect to the good word of

the people which Hippolytus did to Venus,--though he abstain from

her mysteries, he will pay his devotions at a distance; (Euripides,

"Hippolytus," 102.) but he will not be so cynical and sullen as not to

hear with gladness the commendations of virtuous men like himself; he

will neither engage himself in a restless pursuit of wealth, interest,

or honor, nor will he on the other hand be so rustic and insensible as

to refuse them in a moderate degree, when they fairly come in his way;

in like manner he will not court and follow handsome and beautiful

youth, but will rather choose such as are of a teachable disposition,

of a gentle behavior, and lovers of learning. The charms and graces of

youth will not make a philosopher shy of their conversation, when

the endowments of their minds are answerable to the features of their

bodies. The case is the same when greatness of place and fortune concur

with a well disposed person; he will not therefore forbear loving and

respecting such a one, nor be afraid of the name of a courtier, nor

think it a curse that such attendance and dependence should be his fate.

They that try most Dame Venus to despise

Do sin as much as they who her most prize.

(From the "Veiled Hippolytus" of Euripides, Frag. 431.)

The application is easy to the matter in hand.

A philosopher therefore, if he is of a retired humor, will not avoid

such persons; while one who generously designs his studies for the

public advantage will cheerfully embrace their advances of friendship,

will not bore them to hear him, will lay aside his sophistic terms and

distinctions, and will rejoice to discourse and pass his time with them

when they are disposed.

I plough the wide Berecynthian fields,

Full six days' journey long,

(From the "Niobe" of Aechylus, Frag. 153.)

says one boastingly in the poet; the same man, if he were as much a

lover of mankind as of husbandry, would much rather bestow his pains on

such a farm, the fruits of which would serve a great number, than to be

always dressing the olive-yard of some cynical malcontent, which, when

all was done, would scarce yield oil enough to dress a salad or to

supply his lamp in the long winter evenings. Epicurus himself, who

places happiness in the profoundest quiet and sluggish inactivity, as

the only secure harbor from the storms of this troublesome world, could

not but confess that it is both more noble and delightful to do than to

receive a kindness; (Almost the same words with those of our Saviour, It

is more blessed to give than to receive. So that a man can scarcely be

a true Epicurean without practising some of the maxims of Christianity.)

for there is nothing which produces so humane and genuine a sort of

pleasure as that of doing good. He who gave the names to the three

Graces was intelligent, for they all mean delectation and joy, (Aglaia,

Euphrosyne, and Thalia.) and these feelings surely are far greater and

purer in the giver. This is so evidently true, that we all receive good

turns blushing and with some confusion, but we are always gay and well

pleased when we are conferring one.

If then it is so pleasant to do good to a few, how are their hearts

dilated with joy who are benefactors to whole cities, provinces, and

kingdoms? And such benefactors are they who instil good principles into

those upon whom so many millions do depend. On the other hand, those

who debauch the minds of great men--as sycophants, false informers, and

flatterers worse than both, manifestly do--are the centre of all the

curses of a nation, as men not only infuse deadly poison into the

cistern of a private house, but into the public springs of which so many

thousands are to drink. The people therefore laughed at the parasites

of Callias, whom, as Eupolis says, neither with fire nor brass nor steel

could prevent from supping with him; but as for the favorites of those

execrable tyrants Apollodorus, Phalaris, and Dionysius, they racked

them, they flayed them alive, they roasted them at slow fires, looked on

them as the very pests of society and disgraces of human nature; for to

debauch a simple person is indeed an ill thing, but to corrupt a prince

is an infinite mischief. In like manner, he who instructs an ordinary

man makes him to pass his life decently and with comfort; but he

who instructs a prince, by correcting his errors and clearing his

understanding, is a philosopher for the public, by rectifying the very

mould and model by which whole nations are formed and regulated. It is

the custom of all nations to pay a peculiar honor and deference to their

priests; and the reason of it is, because they do not only pray for good

things for themselves, their own families and friends, but for whole

communities, for the whole state of mankind. Yet we are not so fond as

to think that the priests make the gods to be givers of good things,

or inspire a vein of beneficence into them; but they only make their

supplications to a being which of itself is inclinable to answer

their requests. But in this a good tutor hath the privilege above the

priests,--he effectually renders a prince more disposed to actions

of justice, of moderation, and mercy, and therefore hath a greater

satisfaction of mind when he reflects upon it.

For my own part, I cannot but think that an ordinary mechanic--for

instance, a maker of musical instruments--would be much more attentive

and pleased at his work, and if his harp would be touched by the famous

Amphion, and in his hand to serve for the builder of Thebes, or if that

Thales had bespoke it, who was so great a master by the force of

his music he pacified a popular tumult amongst the Lacedaemonians. A

good-natured shipwright would ply his work more heartily, if he were

constructing the rudder for the admiral galley of Themistocles when

he fought for the liberty of Greece, or of Pompey when he went on his

expedition against the pirates: what ecstasy of delight then must

a philosopher be in, when he reflects that his scholar is a man of

authority, a prince or great potentate, that he is employed in so public

a work, giving laws to him who is to give laws to a whole nation, who

is to punish vice, and to reward the virtuous with riches and honor? The

builder of the ARGO certainly would have been mightily pleased, if he

had known what noble mariners were to row in his ship, and that at last

she should be translated into heaven; and a carpenter would not be half

so much pleased to make a chariot or plough, as to cut the tablets on

which Solon's laws were to be engraved. In like manner the discourses

and rules of philosophy, being once deeply stamped and imprinted on the

minds of great personages, will stick so close, that the prince shall

seem no other than justice incarnate and animated law. This was the

design of Plato's voyage into Sicily,--he hoped that the lectures of

his philosophy would serve for laws to Dionysius, and bring his affairs

again into a good posture. But the soul of that unfortunate prince was

like paper scribbled all over with the characters of vice; its piercing

and corroding quality had stained quite through, and sunk into the very

substance of his soul. Whereas, such persons must be taken when they are

on the run, if they are to absorb useful discourses.

END OF TWO--------

SENTIMENTS CONCERNING NATURE WITH WHICH PHILOSOPHERS WERE DELIGHTED

BOOK I.

It being our determination to discourse of Natural Philosophy, we judge

it necessary, in the first place and chiefly, to divide the body of

philosophy into its proper members, so that we may know what is that

which is called philosophy, and what part of it is physical, or the

explanation of natural things. The Stoics affirm that wisdom is the

knowledge of things human and divine; that philosophy is the pursuit of

that art which is convenient to this knowledge; that virtue is the sole

and sovereign art which is thus convenient; and this distributes itself

into three general parts--natural, moral, and logical. By which just

reason (they say) philosophy is tripartite; of which one natural, the

other moral, the third logical. The natural when our inquiries are

concerning the world and all things contained in it; the ethical is the

employment of our minds in those things which concern the manners of

man's life; the logical (which they also call dialectical) regulates our

conversation with others in speaking. Aristotle, Theophrastus, and after

them almost all the Peripatetics give the same division of philosophy.

It is absolutely requisite that the complete person he contemplator of

things which have a being, and the practiser of those thing which are

decent; and this easily appears by the following instances. If the

question be proposed, whether the sun, which is so conspicuous to us, be

informed of a soul or inanimate, he that makes this disquisition is the

thinking man; for he proceeds no farther than to consider the nature of

that thing which is proposed. Likewise, if the question be propounded,

whether the world be infinite, or whether beyond the system of this

world there is any real being, all these things are the objects about

which the understanding of man is conversant.

But if these be the questions,--what measures must be taken to compose

the well-ordered life of man, what are the best methods to govern and

educate children, or what are the exact rules whereby sovereigns may

command and establish laws,--all these queries are proposed for the sole

end of action, and the man skilled therein is the moral and practical

man.

CHAPTER I. WHAT IS NATURE?

Since we have undertaken to make a diligent search into Nature, I cannot

but conclude it necessary to declare what Nature is. It is very absurd

to attempt a discourse of the essence of natural things, and not to

understand what is the power and sphere of Nature. If Aristotle be

credited, Nature is the principle of motion and rest, in that thing in

which it exists as a principle and not by accident. For all things that

are conspicuous to our eyes, which are neither fortuitous nor necessary,

nor have a divine original, nor acknowledge any such like cause, are

called natural and enjoy their proper nature. Of this sort are earth,

fire, water, air, plants, animals; to these may be added all things

produced from them, such as showers, hail, thunders, hurricanes, and

winds. All these confess they had a beginning, none of these were from

eternity, but had something as the origin of them; and likewise animals

and plants have a principle whence they are produced. But Nature, which

in all these things hath the priority, is not only the principle of

motion but of repose; whatsoever enjoys the principle of motion, the

same has a possibility to find a dissolution. Therefore on this account

it is that Nature is the principle of motion and rest.

CHAPTER II. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PRINCIPLE AND AN ELEMENT?

The followers of Aristotle and Plato conclude that elements are

discriminated from principles. Thales the Milesian supposeth that a

principle and the elements are one and the same thing, but it is evident

that they vastly differ one from another. For the elements are

things compounded; but we do pronounce that principles admit not of a

composition, nor are the effects of any other being. Those which we call

elements are earth, water, air, and fire. But we call those principles

which have nothing prior to them out of which they are produced; for

otherwise not these themselves, but rather those things whereof they are

produced, would be the principles. Now there are some things which have

a pre-existence to earth and water, from which they are begotten; to

wit, matter, which is without form or shape; then form, which we call

[Greek omitted] (actuality); and lastly, privation. Thales therefore

is most in error, by affirming that water is both an element and a

principle.

CHAPTER III. WHAT ARE PRINCIPLES?

Thales the Milesian doth affirm that water is the principle from whence

all things in the universe spring. This person appears to be the first

of philosophers; from him the Ionic sect took its denomination, for

there are many families and successions amongst philosophers. After he

had professed philosophy in Egypt, when he was very old, he returned to

Miletus. He pronounced, that all things had their original from water,

and into water all things are resolved. His first ground was, that

whatsoever was the prolific seed of all animals was a principle, and

that is moist; so that it is probable that all things receive their

original from humidity. His second reason was, that all plants are

nourished and fructified by that thing which is moist, of which being

deprived they wither away. Thirdly, that that fire of which the sun and

stars are made is nourished by watery exhalations,--yea, and the world

itself; which moved Homer to sing that the generation of it was from

water:--

The ocean is

Of all things the kind genesis.

(Iliad, xiv. 246.)

Anaximander, who himself was a Milesian, assigns the principle of all

things to the Infinite, from whence all things flow, and into the same

are corrupted; hence it is that infinite worlds are framed, and those

dissolve again into that whence they have their origin. And thus he

farther proceeds, For what other reason is there of an Infinite but

this, that there may be nothing deficient as to the generation or

subsistence of what is in Nature? There is his error, that he doth

not acquaint us what this Infinite is, whether it be air, or water, or

earth, or any other such like body. Besides he is mistaken, in that,

giving us the material cause, he is silent as to the efficient cause of

beings; for this thing which he makes his Infinite can be nothing but

matter; but operation cannot come about in the sphere of matter, except

an efficient cause be annexed.

Anaximenes his fellow-citizen pronounceth, that air is the principle of

all beings; from it all receive their original, and into it all

return. He affirms that our soul is nothing but air; it is that which

constitutes and preserves; the whole world is invested with spirit

and air. For spirit and air are synonymous. This person is in this

deficient, in that he concludes that of pure air, which is a simple

body and is made of one only form, all animals are composed. It is not

possible to think that a single principle should be the matter of all

things, from whence they receive their subsistence; besides this there

must be an operating cause. Silver (for example) is not of itself

sufficient to frame a drinking cup; an operator also is required, which

is the silversmith. The like may be applied to vessels made of wood,

brass, or any other material.

Anaxagoras the Clazomenian asserted Homoeomeries (or parts similar or

homogeneous) to be the original cause of all beings; it seemed to him

impossible that anything could arise of nothing or be dissolved into

nothing. Let us therefore instance in nourishment, which appears simple

and uniform, such as bread which we owe to Ceres and water which we

drink. Of this very nutriment, our hair, our veins, our arteries,

nerves, bones, and all our other parts are nourished. These things

thus being performed, it must be granted that the nourishment which

is received by us contains all those things by which these of us are

produced. In it there are those particles which are producers of blood,

bones, nerves, and all other parts; these particles (he thought) reason

discovers for us. For it is not necessary that we should reduce all

things under the objects of sense; for bread and water are fitted to

the senses, yet in them there are those particles latent which are

discoverable only by reason. It being therefore plain that there are

particles in the nourishment similar to what is produced by it, he

terms these homogeneous parts, averring that they are the principles

of beings. Matter is according to him these similar parts, and the

efficient cause is a Mind, which orders all things that have an

existence. Thus he begins his discourse: "All things were confused one

among another; but Mind divided and brought them to order." In this he

is to be commended, that he yokes together matter and an intellectual

agent.

Archelaus the son of Apollodorus, the Athenian, pronounceth, that the

principles of all things have their origin from an infinite air rarefied

or condensed. Air rarefied is fire, condensed is water.

These philosophers, the followers of Thales, succeeding one another,

made up that sect which takes to itself the denomination of the Ionic.

Pythagoras the Samian, the son of Mnesarchus, from another origin

deduces the principles of all things; it was he who first called

philosophy by its name. He thought the first principles to be numbers,

and those symmetries in them which he styles harmonies; and the

composition of both he terms elements, called geometrical. Again, he

places unity and the indefinite binary number amongst the principles.

One of these principles ends in an efficient and forming cause, which is

Mind, and that is God; the other to the passive and material part, and

that is the visible world. Moreover, the nature of number (he saith)

consists in the ten; for all people, whether Grecians or barbarians,

reckon from one to ten, and thence return to one again. Farther he avers

the virtue of ten consists in the quaternion; the reason whereof is

this,--if any person start from one, and add numbers so as to take in

the quaternary, he shall complete the number ten; if he passes the four,

he shall go beyond the ten; for one, two, three, and four being added

up together make ten. The nature of numbers, therefore, if we regard

the units, abideth in the ten; but if we regard its power, in the four.

Therefore the Pythagoreans say that their most sacred oath is by that

god who delivered to them the quaternary.

By th' founder of the sacred number four,

Eternal Nature's font and source, they swore.

Of this number the soul of man is composed; for mind, knowledge,

opinion, and sense are the four that complete the soul, from which all

sciences, all arts, all rational faculties derive themselves. For what

our mind perceives, it perceives after the manner of a thing that is

one, the soul itself being a unity; as for instance, a multitude of

persons are not the object of our sense nor are comprehended by us, for

they are infinite; our understanding gives the general concept of A MAN,

in which all individuals agree. The number of individuals is infinite;

the generic or specific nature of all being is a unit, or to be

apprehended as one only thing; from this one conception we give the

genuine measures of all existence, and therefore we affirm that a

certain class of beings are rational and discoursive. But when we come

to give the nature of a horse, it is that animal which neighs; and this

being common to all horses, it is manifest that the understanding, which

hath such like conceptions, is in its nature unity. It follows that

the number called the infinite binary must be science; in every

demonstration or belief belonging to science, and in every syllogism, we

draw that conclusion which is in dispute from those propositions which

are by all granted, by which means another proposition is obtained from

the premises. The comprehension of these we call knowledge; for which

reason science is the binary number. But opinion is the ternary; for

that rationally follows from comprehension. The objects of opinion are

many things, and the ternary number denotes a multitude, as "Thrice

happy Grecians"; for which reason Pythagoras admits the ternary. This

sect of philosophers is called the Italic, by reason Pythagoras started

his school in Italy; his hatred of the tyranny of Polycrates enforced

him to abandon his native country Samos.

Heraclitus and Hippasus of Metapontum suppose that fire gives the

origination to all beings, that they all flow from fire, and in fire

they all conclude; for of fire when first quenched the world was

constituted. The first part of the world, being most condensed and

contracted within itself, made the earth; but part of that earth being

loosened and made thin by fire, water was produced; afterwards this

water being exhaled and rarefied into vapors became air; after all this

the world itself, and all other corporeal beings, shall be dissolved by

fire in the universal conflagration. By them therefore it appears that

fire is what gives beginning to all things, and is that in which all

things receive their period.

Epicurus the son of Neocles, the Athenian, his philosophical sentiments

being the same with those of Democritus, affirms that the principles of

all being are bodies which are only perceptible by reason; they admit

not of a vacuity, nor of any original, but being of a self-existence are

eternal and incorruptible; they are not liable to any diminution,

they are indestructible, nor is it possible for them to receive any

transformation of parts, or admit of any alterations; of these reason is

only the discoverer; they are in a perpetual motion in vacuity, and by

means of the empty space; for the vacuum itself is infinite, and the

bodies that move in it are infinite. Those bodies acknowledge these

three accidents, figure, magnitude, and gravity. Democritus acknowledged

but two, magnitude and figure. Epicurus added the third, to wit,

gravity; for he pronounced that it is necessary that bodies receive

their motion from that impression which springs from gravity,

otherwise they could not be moved. The figures of atoms cannot be

incomprehensible, but they are not infinite. These figures are neither

hooked nor trident-shaped nor ring-shaped, such figures as these being

exposed to collision; but the atoms are impassible, impenetrable; they

have indeed figures of their own, which are conceived only by reason.

It is called an atom, by reason not of its smallness but of its

indivisibility; in it no vacuity, no passible affection is to be found.

And that there is an atom is perfectly clear; for there are elements

which have a perpetual duration, and there are animals which admit of a

vacuity, and there is a unity.

Empedocles the Agrigentine, the son of Meton, affirms that there are

four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, and two powers which bear

the greatest command in nature, concord and discord, of which one is the

union, the other the division of beings. Thus he sings,

Hear first the four roots of all created things:--

Bright shining Jove, Juno that beareth life,

Pluto beneath the earth, and Nestis who

Doth with her tears water the human fount.

By Jupiter he understands fire and ether, by Juno that gives life he

means the air, by Pluto the earth, by Nestis and the spring of all

mortals (as it were) seed and water.

Socrates the son of Sophroniscus, and Plato son of Ariston, both natives

of Athens, entertain the same opinion concerning the universe; for

they suppose three principles, God, matter, and the idea. God is the

universal understanding; matter is that which is the first substratum,

accommodated for the generation and corruption of beings; the idea is

an incorporeal essence, existing in the cogitations and apprehensions of

God; for God is the soul and mind of the world.

Aristotle the son of Nichomachus, the Stagirite, constitutes three

principles; Entelecheia (which is the same with form), matter, and

privation. He acknowledges four elements, and adds a certain fifth body,

which is ethereal and not obnoxious to mutation.

Zeno son of Mnaseas, the native of Citium, avers these to be principles,

God and matter, the first of which is the efficient cause, the other the

passible and receptive. Four more elements he likewise confesses.

CHAPTER IV. HOW WAS THIS WORLD COMPOSED IN THAT ORDER AND AFTER THAT

MANNER IT IS?

The world being broken and confused, after this manner it was reduced

into figure and composure as now it is. The insectible bodies or

atoms, by a wild and fortuitous motion, without any governing power,

incessantly and swiftly were hurried one amongst another, many bodies

being jumbled together; upon this account they have a diversity in the

figures and magnitude. These therefore being so jumbled together, those

bodies which were the greatest and heaviest sank into the lowest place;

they that were of a lesser magnitude, being round, smooth, and slippery,

these meeting with those heavier bodies were easily broken into pieces,

and were carried into higher places. But when that force whereby

these variously particles figured particles fought with and struck one

another, and forced the lighter upwards, did cease, and there was no

farther power left to drive them into superior regions, yet they were

wholly hindered from descending downwards, and were compelled to reside

in those places capable to receive them; and these were the heavenly

spaces, unto which a multitude of these small bodies were hurled, and

these being thus shivered fell into coherence and mutual embraces,

and by this means the heaven was produced. Then a various and great

multitude of atoms enjoying the same nature, as it is before asserted,

being hurried aloft, did form the stars. The multitude of these exhaled

bodies, having struck and broke the air in shivers, forced a passage

through it; this being turned into wind invested the stars, as it

moved, and whirled them about, by which means to this present time that

circulary motion which these stars have in the heavens is maintained.

Much after the same manner the earth was made; for by those little

particles whose gravity made them to reside in the lower places the

earth was formed. The heaven, fire, and air were constituted of those

particles which were carried aloft. But a great deal of matter remaining

in the earth, this being condensed by the driving of the winds and the

air from the stars, every little part and form of it was compressed,

which created the element of water; but this being fluidly disposed did

run into those places which were hollow, and these places were those

that were capable to receive and protect it; or the water, subsisting

by itself, did make the lower places hollow. After this manner the

principal parts of the world were constituted.

CHAPTER V. WHETHER THE UNIVERSE IS ONE SINGLE THING.

The Stoics pronounce that the world is one thing, and this they say is

the universe and is corporeal.

But Empedocles's opinion is, that the world is one; yet by no means the

system of this world must be styled the universe, but that it is a small

part of it, and the remainder is inactive matter.

What to Plato seems the truest he thus declares, that there is one

world, and that world is the universe; and this he endeavors to evince

by three arguments. First, that the world could not be complete and

perfect, if it did not within itself include all beings. Secondly, nor

could it give the true resemblance of its original and exemplar, if

it were not the one only begotten thing. Thirdly, it could not be

incorruptible, if there were any being out of its compass to whose power

it might be obnoxious. But to Plato it may be thus returned. First, that

the world is not complete and perfect, nor doth it contain all things

within itself. And if man is a perfect being, yet he doth not encompass

all things. Secondly, that there are many exemplars and originals of

statues, houses, and pictures. Thirdly, how is the world perfect, if

anything beyond it is possible to be moved about it? But the world

is not incorruptible, nor can it be so conceived, because it had an

original.

To Metrodorus it seems absurd, that in a large field one only stalk

should grow, and in an infinite space one only world exist; and that

this universe is infinite is manifest by this, that there is an infinity

of causes. Now if this world be finite and the causes producing it

infinite, it follows that the worlds likewise be infinite; for where

all causes concur, there the effects also must appear, let the causes be

what they will, either atoms or elements.

CHAPTER VI. WHENCE DID MEN OBTAIN THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXISTENCE AND

ESSENCE OF A DEITY?

The Stoics thus define the essence of a god. It is a spirit intellectual

and fiery, which acknowledges no shape, but is continually changed into

what it pleases, and assimilates itself to all things. The knowledge

of this deity they first received from the pulchritude of those things

which so visibly appeared to us; for they concluded that nothing

beauteous could casually or fortuitously be formed, but that it was

framed from the art of a great understanding that produced the world.

That the world is very resplendent is made perspicuous from the figure,

the color, the magnitude of it, and likewise from the wonderful variety

of those stars which adorn this world. The world is spherical; the

orbicular hath the pre-eminence above all other figures, for being round

itself it hath its parts like itself. (On this account, according to

Plato, the understanding, which is the most sacred part of man, is in

the head.) The color of it is most beauteous; for it is painted with

blue; which, though little blacker than purple, yet hath such a shining

quality, that by reason of the vehement efficacy of its color it cuts

through such a space of air; whence it is that at so great a distance

the heavens are to be contemplated. And in this very greatness of the

world the beauty of it appears. View all things: that which contains the

rest carries a beauty with it, as an animal or a tree. Also things which

are visible to us accomplish the beauty of the world. The oblique

circle called the Zodiac in heaven is with different images painted and

distinguished:--

There's Cancer, Leo, Virgo, and the Claws;

Scorpio, Arcitenens, and Capricorn;

Amphora, Pisces, then the Ram, and Bull;

The lovely pair of Brothers next succeed.

(From Aratus.)

There are a thousand others that give us the suitable reflections of the

beauty of the world. Thus Euripides:--

The starry splendor of the skies,

The beautiful and varied work of that wise

Creator, Time.

From this the knowledge of a god is conveyed to man; that the sun, the

moon, and the rest of the stars, being carried under the earth, rise

again in their proper color, magnitude, place, and times. Therefore they

who by tradition delivered to us the knowledge and veneration of

the gods did it by these three manner of ways:--first, from Nature;

secondly, from fables; thirdly, from the testimony supplied by the

laws of commonwealths. Philosophers taught the natural way; poets, the

fabulous; and the political way is to be had from the constitutions of

each commonwealth. All sorts of this learning are distinguished into

these seven parts. The first is from things that are conspicuous, and

the observation of those bodies which are in places superior to us. To

men the heavenly bodies that are so visible did give the knowledge of

the deity; when they contemplated that they are the causes of so great

an harmony, that they regulate day and night, winter and summer, by

their rising and setting, and likewise considered those things which

by their influences in the earth do receive a being and do likewise

fructify. It was manifest to men that the Heaven was the father of those

things, and the Earth the mother; that the Heaven was the father is

clear, since from the heavens there is the pouring down of waters, which

have their spermatic faculty; the Earth the mother, because she receives

them and brings forth. Likewise men considering that the stars are

running (Greek omitted) in a perpetual motion, that the sun and moon

give us the stimulus to view and contemplate (Greek omitted), they call

them all gods (Greek omitted).

In the second and third place, they thus distinguished the deities into

those which are beneficial and those that are injurious to mankind.

Those which are beneficial they call Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, Ceres;

those who are mischievous the Dirae, Furies, and Mars. These, which

threaten dangers and violence, men endeavor to appease and conciliate

by sacred rites. The fourth and the fifth order of gods they assign to

things and passions; to passions, Love, Venus, and Desire; the deities

that preside over things, Hope, Justice, and Eunomia.

The sixth order of deities are the ones made by the poets; Hesiod,

willing to find out a father for those gods that acknowledge an

original, invented their progenitors,--

Hyperion, Coeus, and Iapetus,

With Creius:

(Hesiod, "Theogony," 134.)

upon which account this is called the fabulous. The seventh rank of

the deities added to the rest are those which, by their beneficence to

mankind, were honored with a divine worship, though they were born of

mortal race; of this sort were Hercules, Castor and Pollux, and Bacchus.

These are reputed to be of a human species; for of all beings that which

is divine is most excellent, and man amongst all animals is adorned with

the greatest beauty, is also the best, being adorned by virtue above

the rest because of the gift of intellect: therefore it was thought that

those who were admirable for excellence should resemble that which is

the best and most beautiful.

CHAPTER VII. WHAT IS GOD?

Some of the philosophers, such as Diagoras the Melian, Theodorus the

Cyrenean, and Euemerus the Tegeatan, did deny unanimously that there

were any gods; and Callimachus the Cyrenean discovered his mind

concerning Euemerus in these Iambic verses, thus writing:--

To th' ante-mural temple flock apace,

Where he that long ago composed of brass

Great Jupiter, Thrasonic old bald pate,

Now scribbles impious books,--a boastful ass!

meaning books which prove there are no gods. Euripides the tragedian

durst not openly declare his sentiment; the court of Areopagus terrified

him. Yet he sufficiently manifested his thoughts by this method. He

presented in his tragedy Sisyphus, the first and great patron of this

opinion, and introduced himself as one agreeing with him:--

Disorder in those days did domineer,

And brutal power kept the world in fear.

Afterwards by the sanction of laws wickedness was suppressed; but by

reason that laws could prohibit only public villanies, yet could not

hinder many persons from acting secret impieties, some wise persons

gave this advice, that we ought to blind truth with lying disguises, and

persuade men that there is a God:--

There's an eternal God does hear and see

And understand every impiety;

Though it in dark recess or thought committed be.

But this poetical fable ought to be rejected, he thought, along with

Callimachus, who thus saith:--

If you believe a God, it must be meant

That you conceive this God omnipotent.

But God cannot do everything; for, if it were so, then a God could make

snow black, and the fire cold, and him that is in a posture of sitting

to be upright, and so on the contrary. The brave-speaking Plato

pronounceth that God formed the world after his own image; but this

smells rank of the old dotages, old comic writers would say; for how did

God, casting his eye upon himself, frame this universe? Or how can God

be spherical, and be inferior to man?

Anaxagoras avers that bodies did consist from all eternity, but the

divine intellect did reduce them into their proper orders, and effected

the origination of all beings. But Plato did not suppose that the

primary bodies had their consistence and repose, but that they were

moved confusedly and in disorder; but God, knowing that order was better

than confusion, did digest them into the best methods. Both these were

equally peccant; for both suppose God to be the great moderator of human

affairs and for that cause to have formed this present world; when it

is apparent that an immortal and blessed being, replenished with all his

glorious excellencies, and not at all obnoxious to any sort of evil, but

being wholly occupied with his own felicity and immortality, would not

employ himself with the concerns of men; for certainly miserable is the

being which, like a laborer or artificer, is molested by the troubles

and cares which the forming and governing of this world must give him.

Add to this, that the God whom these men profess was either not at all

existing before this present world (when bodies were either reposed or

in a disordered motion), or that at that time God did either sleep, or

else was in a constant watchfulness, or that he did neither of these.

Now neither the first nor the second can be entertained, because they

suppose God to be eternal; if God from eternity was in a continual

sleep, he was in an eternal death,--and what is death but an eternal

sleep?--but no sleep can affect a deity, for the immortality of God and

alliance to death are vastly different. But if God was in a continual

vigilance, either there was something wanting to make him happy, or else

his beatitude was perfectly complete; but according to neither of these

can God be said to be blessed; not according to the first, for if

there be any deficiency there is no perfect bliss; not according to the

second, for, if there be nothing wanting to the felicity of God, it must

be a needless enterprise for him to busy himself in human affairs. And

how can it be supposed that God administers by his own providence human

concerns, when to vain and trifling persons prosperous things happen, to

great and high adverse? Agamemnon was both

A virtuous prince, for warlike acts renowned,

("Iliad," iii. 179.)

and by an adulterer and adulteress was vanquished and perfidiously

slain. Hercules, after he had freed the life of man from many things

that were pernicious to it, perished by the witchcraft and poison of

Deianira.

Thales said that the intelligence of the world was God.

Anaximander concluded that the stars were heavenly deities.

Democritus said that God, being a globe of fire, is the intelligence and

the soul of the world.

Pythagoras says that, of his principles, unity is God; and the good,

which is indeed the nature of a unity, is mind itself; but the binary

number, which is infinite, is a daemon, and evil,--about which the

multitude of material beings and this visible world are related.

Socrates and Plato agree that God is that which is one, hath its

original from its own self, is of a singular subsistence, is one only

being perfectly good; all these various names signifying goodness do

all centre in mind; hence God is to be understood as that mind and

intellect, which is a separate idea, that is to say, pure and unmixed of

all matter, and not mingled with anything subject to passions.

Aristotle's sentiment is, that God hath his residence in superior

regions, and hath placed his throne in the sphere of the universe, and

is a separate idea; which sphere is an ethereal body, which is by him

styled the fifth essence or quintessence. For there is a division of the

universe into spheres, which are contiguous by their nature but appear

to reason to be separated; and he concludes that each of the spheres is

an animal, composed of a body and soul; the body of them is ethereal,

moved orbicularly, the soul is the rational form, which is unmoved, and

yet is the cause that the sphere is in motion.

The Stoics affirm that God is a thing more common and obvious, and is

a mechanic fire which every way spreads itself to produce the world; it

contains in itself all seminal virtues, and by this means all things by

a fatal necessity were produced. This spirit, passing through the whole

world, received different names from the mutations in the matter through

which it ran in its journey. God therefore is the world, the stars, the

earth, and (highest of all) the mind in the heavens. In the judgment of

Epicurus all the gods are anthropomorphites, or have the shape of men;

but they are perceptible only by reason, for their nature admits of no

other manner of being apprehended, their parts being so small and fine

that they give no corporeal representations. The same Epicurus asserts

that there are four other natural beings which are immortal: of this

sort are atoms, the vacuum, the infinite, and the similar parts; and

these last are called Homoeomeries and likewise elements.

CHAPTER VIII. OF THOSE THAT ARE CALLED GENIUSES AND HEROES

Having treated of the essence of the deities in a just order, it follows

that we discourse of daemons and heroes. Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, and

the Stoics do conclude that daemons are essences endowed with souls;

that the heroes are the souls separated from their bodies, some are

good, some are bad; the good are those whose souls are good, the evil

those whose souls are wicked. All this is rejected by Epicurus.

CHAPTER IX. OF MATTER.

Matter is that first being which is substrate for generation,

corruption, and all other alterations.

The disciples of Thales and Pythagoras, with the Stoics, are of opinion

that matter is changeable, mutable, convertible, and sliding through all

things.

The followers of Democritus aver that the vacuum, the atom, and the

incorporeal substance are the first beings, and not obnoxious to

passions.

Aristotle and Plato affirm that matter is of that species which is

corporeal, void of any form, species, figure, and quality, but apt to

receive all forms, that she may be the nurse, the mother, and origin of

all other beings. But they that do say that water, earth, air, and

fire are matter do likewise say that matter cannot be without form, but

conclude it is a body; but they that say that individual particles and

atoms are matter do say that matter is without form.

CHAPTER X. OF IDEAS.

An idea is a being incorporeal, not subsisting by itself, but gives

figure unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its phenomena.

Socrates and Plato conjecture that these ideas are beings separate from

matter, subsisting in the understanding and imagination of the deity,

that is, of mind.

Aristotle accepted forms and ideas; but he doth not believe them

separated from matter, or patterns of the things God has made.

Those Stoics, that are of the school of Zeno, profess that ideas are

nothing else but the conceptions of our own mind.

CHAPTER XI. OF CAUSES.

A cause is that by which anything is produced, or by which anything is

effected.

Plato gives this triple division of causes,--the material, the

efficient, and the final cause; the principal cause he judges to be the

efficient, which is the mind and intellect.

Pythagoras and Aristotle judge the first causes are incorporeal beings,

but those that are causes by accident or participation become corporeal

substances; by this means the world is corporeal.

The Stoics grant that all causes are corporeal, inasmuch as they are

physical.

CHAPTER XII. OF BODIES.

A body is that being which hath these three dimensions, breadth, depth,

and length;--or a bulk which makes a sensible resistance;--or whatsoever

of its own nature possesseth a place.

Plato saith that it is neither heavy nor light in its own nature, when

it exists in its own place; but being in the place where another should

be, then it has an inclination by which it tends to gravity or levity.

Aristotle saith that, if we simply consider things in their own nature,

the earth only is to be judged heavy, and fire light; but air and water

are on occasions heavy and at other times light.

The Stoics think that of the four elements two are light, fire and air;

two ponderous, earth and water; that which is naturally light doth by

its own nature, not by any inclination, recede from its own centre; but

that which is heavy doth by its own nature tend to its centre; for the

centre is not a heavy thing in itself.

Epicurus thinks that bodies are not limited; but the first bodies,

which are simple bodies, and all those composed of them, all acknowledge

gravity; that all atoms are moved, some perpendicularly, some obliquely;

some are carried aloft either by immediate impulse or with vibrations.

CHAPTER XIII. OF THOSE THINGS THAT ARE LEAST IN NATURE.

Empedocles, before the four elements, introduceth the most minute bodies

which resemble elements; but they did exist before the elements, having

similar parts and orbicular.

Heraclitus brings in the smallest fragments, and those indivisible.

CHAPTER XIV. OF FIGURES.

A figure is the exterior appearance, the circumscription, and the

boundary of a body.

The Pythagoreans say that the bodies of the four elements are spherical,

fire being in the supremest place only excepted, whose figure is

conical.

CHAPTER XV. OF COLORS.

Color is the visible quality of a body.

The Pythagoreans called color the external appearance of a body.

Empedocles, that which is consentaneous to the passages of the eye.

Plato, that they are fires emitted from bodies, which have parts

harmonious for the sight. Zeno the Stoic, that colors are the first

figurations of matter. The Pythagoreans, that colors are of four sorts,

white and black, red and pale; and they derive the variety of colors

from the mixtures of the elements, and that seen in animals also from

the variety of food and the air.

CHAPTER XVI. OF THE DIVISION OF BODIES.

The disciples of Thales and Pythagoras grant that all bodies are

passible and divisible into infinity. Others hold that atoms and

indivisible parts are there fixed, and admit not of a division into

infinity. Aristotle, that all bodies are potentially but not actually

divisible into infinity.

CHAPTER XVII. HOW BODIES ARE MIXED AND CONTEMPERATED ONE WITH ANOTHER.

The ancient philosophers held that the mixture of elements proceeded

from the alteration of qualities; but the disciples of Anaxagoras

and Democritus say it is done by apposition. Empedocles composes the

elements of still minuter bulks, those which are the most minute and may

be termed the element of elements. Plato assigns three bodies (but he

will not allow these to be elements, nor properly so called), air, fire,

and water, which are mutable into one another; but the earth is mutable

into none of these.

CHAPTER XVIII. OF A VACUUM.

All the natural philosophers from Thales to Plato rejected a vacuum.

Empedocles says that there is nothing of a vacuity in Nature, nor

anything superabundant. Leucippus, Democritus, Demetrius, Metrodorus,

Epicurus, that the atoms are in number infinite; and that a vacuum is

infinite in magnitude. The Stoics, that within the compass of the world

there is no vacuum, but beyond it the vacuum is infinite. Aristotle,

that the vacuum beyond the world is so great that the heaven has liberty

to breathe into it, for the heaven is fiery.

CHAPTER XIX. OF PLACE.

Plato, to define place, calls it that thing which in its own bosom

receives forms and ideas; by which metaphor he denotes matter, being

(as it were) a nurse or receptacle of beings. Aristotle, that it is the

ultimate superficies of the circumambient body, contiguous to that which

it doth encompass.

CHAPTER XX. OF SPACE.

The Stoics and Epicureans make a place, a vacuum, and space to differ.

A vacuum is that which is void of anything that may be called a body;

place is that which is possessed by a body; a space that which is partly

filled with a body, as a cask with wine.

CHAPTER XXI. OF TIME.

In the sense of Pythagoras, time is that sphere which encompasses

the world. Plato says that it is a movable image of eternity, or the

interval of the world's motion.

Eratosthenes, that it is the solar motion.

CHAPTER XXII. OF THE SUBSTANCE AND NATURE OF TIME.

Plato says that the heavenly motion is time. Most of the Stoics that

motion is time. Most philosophers think that time had no commencement;

Plato, that time had only in intelligence a beginning.

CHAPTER XXIII. OF MOTION.

Plato and Pythagoras say that motion is a difference and alteration in

matter. Aristotle, that it is the actual operation of that which may be

moved. Democritus, that there is but one sort of motion, and it is that

which is vibratory. Epicurus, that there are two species of motion, one

perpendicular, and the other oblique. Herophilus, that one species of

motion is obvious only to reason, the other to sense. Heraclitus utterly

denies that there is anything of quiet or repose in nature; for that is

the state of the dead; one sort of motion is eternal, which he assigns

to beings eternal, the other perishable, to those things which are

perishable.

CHAPTER XXIV. OF GENERATION AND CORRUPTION.

Parmenides Melissus, and Zeno deny that there are any such things

as generation and corruption, for they suppose that the universe is

unmovable. Empedocles, Epicurus, and other philosophers that combine

in this, that the world is framed of small corporeal particles meeting

together, affirm that corruption and generation are not so properly to

be accepted; but there are conjunctions and separations, which do not

consist in any distinction according to their qualities, but are made

according to quantity by coalition or disjunction. Pythagoras, and all

those who take for granted that matter is subject to mutation, say that

generation and corruption are to be accepted in their proper sense, and

that they are accomplished by the alteration, mutation, and dissolution

of elements.

CHAPTER XXV. OF NECESSITY.

Thales says that necessity is omnipotent, and that it exerciseth an

empire over everything. Pythagoras, that the world is invested by

necessity. Parmenides and Democritus, that there is nothing in the world

but what is necessary, and that this same necessity is otherwise called

fate, justice, providence, and the architect of the world.

CHAPTER XXVI. OF THE NATURE OF NECESSITY.

But Plato distinguisheth and refers some things to Providence, others

to necessity. Empedocles makes the nature of necessity to be that cause

which employs principles and elements. Democritus makes it to be a

resistance, impulse, and force of matter. Plato sometimes says that

necessity is matter; at other times, that it is the habitude or respect

of the efficient cause towards matter.

CHAPTER XXVII. OF DESTINY OR FATE.

Heraclitus, who attributes all things to fate, makes necessity to be

the same thing with it. Plato admits of a necessity in the minds and the

acts of men, but yet he introduceth a cause which flows from ourselves.

The Stoics, in this agreeing with Plato, say that necessity is a cause

invincible and violent; that fate is the ordered complication of causes,

in which there is an intexture of those things which proceed from our

own determination, so that certain things are to be attributed to fate,

others not.

CHAPTER XXVIII. OF THE NATURE OF FATE.

According to Heraclitus, the essence of fate is a certain reason which

penetrates the substance of all being; and this is an ethereal body,

containing in itself that seminal faculty which gives an original to

every being in the universe. Plato affirms that it is the eternal reason

and the eternal law of the nature of the world. Chrysippus, that it is a

spiritual faculty, which in due order doth manage and rule the universe.

Again, in his book styled the "Definitions," that fate is the reason

of the world, or that it is that law whereby Providence rules and

administers everything that is in the world; or it is that reason by

which all things have been, all things are, and all things will be

produced. The Stoics say that it is a chain of causes, that is, it is

an order and connection of causes which cannot be resisted. Posidonius,

that it is a being the third in degree from Jupiter; the first of beings

is Jupiter, the second Nature, and the third Fate.

CHAPTER XXIX. OF FORTUNE.

Plato says, that it is an accidental cause and a casual consequence in

things which proceed from the election and counsel of men. Aristotle,

that it is an accidental cause in those things done by an impulse for a

certain end; and this cause is uncertain and unstable: there is a great

deal of difference betwixt that which flows from chance and that which

falls out by Fortune; for that which is fortuitous allows also chance,

and belongs to things practical; but what is by chance cannot be also

by Fortune, for it belongs to things without action: Fortune, moreover,

pertains to rational beings, but chance to rational and irrational

beings alike, and even to inanimate things. Epicurus, that it is a cause

not always consistent, but various as to persons, times, and manners.

Anaxagoras and the Stoics, that it is that cause which human reason

cannot comprehend; for there are some things which proceed from

necessity, some things from Fate, some from choice and free-will, some

from Fortune, some from chance.

CHAPTER XXX. OF NATURE.

Empedocles affirms that Nature is nothing else but the mixture and

separation of the elements; for thus he writes in the first book of his

natural philosophy:--

Nature gives neither life nor death,

Mutation makes us die or breathe.

The elements first are mixed, then each

Do part: this Nature is in mortal speech.

Anaxagoras is of the same opinion, that Nature is coalition and

separation, that is, generation and corruption.

BOOK II.

Having finished my dissertation concerning principles and

elements and those things which chiefly appertain to them, I will turn

my pen to discourse of those things which are produced by them, and will

take my beginning from the world, which contains and encompasseth all

beings.

CHAPTER I. OF THE WORLD.

Pythagoras was the first philosopher that called the world [Greek

omitted], from the order and beauty of it; for so that word signifies.

Thales and his followers say the world is one. Democritus, Epicurus,

and their scholar Metrodorus affirm that there are infinite worlds in

an infinite space, for that infinite vacuum in its whole extent contains

them. Empedocles, that the circle which the sun makes in its motion

circumscribes the world, and that circle is the utmost bound of the

world. Seleucus, that the world knows no limits. Diogenes, that the

universe is infinite, but this world is finite. The Stoics make a

difference between that which is called the universe, and that which is

called the whole world;--the universe is the infinite space considered

with the vacuum, the vacuity being removed gives the right conception of

the world; so that the universe and the world are not the same thing.