The Complete Works, vol 3: Essays and Miscellanies | Page 7

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