ooking on the
plain; they bring minds impressed with different notions, and direct
their inquiries to different ends; they form, therefore, contrary
conclusions, and each wonders at the other's absurdity.

We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others
differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves.
How often we alter our minds, we do not always remark; because the
change is sometimes made imperceptibly and gradually, and the last
conviction effaces all memory of the former: yet every man, accustomed
from time to time to take a survey of his own notions, will by a slight
retrospection be able to discover, that his mind has suffered many
revolutions; that the same things have in the several parts of his life
been condemned and approved, pursued and shunned: and that on many
occasions, even when his practice has been steady, his mind has been
wavering, and he has persisted in a scheme of action, rather because he
feared the censure of inconstancy, than because he was always pleased
with his own choice.

Of the different faces shown by the same objects, as they are viewed on
opposite sides, and of the different inclinations which they must
constantly raise in him that contemplates them, a more striking example
cannot easily be found than two Greek epigrammatists will afford us in
their accounts of human life, which I shall lay before the reader in
English prose.

Posidippus, a comick poet, utters this complaint: "Through which of the
paths of life is it eligible to pass? In public assemblies are debates
and troublesome affairs: domestick privacies are haunted with anxieties;
in the country is labour; on the sea is terrour: in a foreign land, he
that has money must live in fear, he that wants it must pine in
distress: are you married? you are troubled with suspicions; are you
single? you languish in solitude; children occasion toil, and a
childless life is a state of destitution: the time of youth is a time of
folly, and gray hairs are loaded with infirmity. This choice only,
therefore, can be made, either never to receive being, or immediately to
lose it[2]."

Such and so gloomy is the prospect, which Posidippus has laid before us.
But we are not to acquiesce too hastily in his determination against the
value of existence: for Metrodorus, a philosopher of Athens, has shown,
that life has pleasures as well as pains; and having exhibited the
present state of man in brighter c