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 creatures of a day, uncertain
and unfixed, and to liken our lives to leaves that both spring and fall
in the compass 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 (it is said) a body at its utmost vigor will through
delicacy very soon admit of changes.
6. 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 succeeding in attaining to that firm and steadfast assurance
from it which they expect. But to do no wickedness will contribute
nothing to our assurance; for it is not suffering justly 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 render life perilous and uneasy, and
that to the good as well as to the bad, if they have learned to place
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.
7. 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 nothing 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 attain unto 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 talk 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 wiser 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 fulness 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.
8. 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 the
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 gaol, 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 celestial things 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
opinions about things after death to disorder themselves with; nor
have they as much as imagination or notion that there is any thing 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.
9. 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 enquiring, or else from that part
of it that is active and heroic. How many and how great satisfactions
either of these affords us, he that would can never 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.
10. 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,