The Complete Works, vol 3: Essays and Miscellanies | Page 9

that tells us
that, had our surmises about heavenly phenomena 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 opinion about
things after death to disorder themselves with; nor have they as much
as imagination or notion that there is anything 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.
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 inquiring, or else from that part of it that is active
and heroic. How many and how great satisfactions either of these
affords us, no one can ever 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.
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, I dread to hear it too, but I must hear.
(Sophocles, "Pedipus Tyrannus," 1169, 1170.)
But this may seem perhaps a