The Complete Works, vol 3: Essays and Miscellanies | Page 5

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