What will you, moreover, say of pain, which Aristippus, Hieronimus, and
most of the sages have reputed the worst of evils; and those who have
denied it by word of mouth have, however, confessed it in effect?
Posidonius being extremely tormented with a sharp and painful disease,
Pompeius came to visit him, excusing himself that he had taken so
unseasonable a time to come to hear him discourse of philosophy.
"The gods forbid," said Posidonius to him, "that pain should ever have
the power to hinder me from talking," and thereupon fell immediately upon
a discourse of the contempt of pain: but, in the meantime, his own
infirmity was playing his part, and plagued him to purpose; to which he
cried out, "Thou mayest work thy will, pain, and torment me with all the
power thou hast, but thou shalt never make me say that thou art an evil."
This story that they make such a clutter withal, what has it to do,
I fain would know, with the contempt of pain? He only fights it with
words, and in the meantime, if the shootings and dolours he felt did not
move him, why did he interrupt his discourse? Why did he fancy he did so
great a thing in forbearing to confess it an evil? All does not here
consist in the imagination; our fancies may work upon other things: but
here is the certain science that is playing its part, of which our senses
themselves are judges:
"Qui nisi sunt veri, ratio quoque falsa sit omnis."
["Which, if they be not true, all reasoning may also be false.
--"Lucretius, iv. 486.]
Shall we persuade our skins that the jerks of a whip agreeably tickle us,
or our taste that a potion of aloes is vin de Graves? Pyrrho's hog is
here in the same predicament with us; he is not afraid of death, 'tis
true, but if you beat him he will cry out to some purpose. Shall we
force the general law of nature, which in every living creature under
heaven is seen to tremble under pain? The very trees seem to groan under
the blows they receive. Death is only felt by reason, forasmuch as it is
the motion of an instant;
"Aut fuit, aut veniet; nihil est praesentis in illa."
["Death has been, or will come: there is nothing of the present in
it."--Estienne de la Boetie, Satires.]
"Morsque minus poenae, quam mora mortis, habet;"
["The delay of death is more painful than death itself."
--Ovid, Ep. Ariadne to Theseus, v. 42.]
a thousand beasts, a thousand men, are sooner de
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