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 think so
well of this subject-matter, 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 require it. 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 honesty! 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 just when they
failed of living honestly they failed also of living pleasurably; for
to live pleasurably without living honestly is even by themselves
allowed inconsistent.
3. 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 adry? 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 at the very extremity of his distemper.
With what consistence then can those that account the pains of the body
so light and easy think so highly of its pleasures? For should we allow
them not to come behind its pains either in duration or magnitude, they
would not yet have their being without them. For Epicurus hath made
the removal of all that pains the common definition of all pleasure;
as if Nature had intended to advance the pleasurable part only to the
destruction of the painful, but would not have it improved any further
in magnitude, and as if she only diverted herself with certain useless
diversifications after she hath once arrived to an abolition of pain.
But now the passage to this, conjoined with an appetence which is the
measure of pleasure, is extremely short and soon over. And therefore
the sense of their narrow entertainment here hath obliged them to
transplant their last end from the body, as from a poor and lean soil,
to the mind, in hopes of enjoying there, as it were, large pastures and
fair meadows of delights and satisfactions.
For Ithaca is no fit place
For mettled steeds to run a race.[140]
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.
4. 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, they take 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 any thing 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, time 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
candle-light, 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 seemed 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 adry 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 deplorable 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.”
5. 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 pitch 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 any intelligent mind. But as at sea (according to
Aeschylus)