xtremity 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 his fancy what he either ate or drank
yesterday, that he may have recourse to that when he wants fresh fare.
See now how much more temperate the Cyrenaics are, who, though they have
drunk out of the same bottle with Epicurus, yet will not allow men so
much as to practise their amours by candlelight, but only under
the covert of the dark, for fear seeing should fasten too quick an
impression of the images of such actions upon the fancy and thereby
too frequently inflame the desire. But these gentlemen account it the
highest accomplishment of a philosopher to have a clear and retentive
memory of all the various figures, passions, and touches of past
pleasure. We will not