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?
29. 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 moderation. But now, as to
those to whom life ends in insensibility and dissolution,—since 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, which 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.
30. Yea, themselves tell us, that the contemplation of future
dissolution leaves them one most assured and complacent good, to wit,
freedom from anxious surmises of incessant and endless evils, and
that Epicurus’s doctrine effects this by stopping the fear of death
by the belief in 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 it
eases 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 say that the
destruction of all that we call ours toucheth us not is absurd, for
it toucheth us already by the very apprehension. 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 beings
and in being suffered never to emerge from annihilation. 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 for ever; 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
sweets of life, seems to be envious in this regard,[157] 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.
31. And yet they are never wearied with their brawling and dunning
of all persons to take the escape of evil for a good, and yet not 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.