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 more of what is painful and afflicting goes out. Like unto this
is that of Epicurus, where he saith: The very essence of good arises
from the escaping of bad, and a man's recollecting, considering, and
rejoicing within himself that this hath befallen him. For what occasions
transcending joy (he saith) is some great impending evil escaped; and
in this lies the very nature and essence of good, if a man consider it
aright, and contain himself when he hath done, and not ramble and prate
idly about it. Oh, the rare satisfaction and felicity these men enjoy,
that can thus rejoice for having undergone no evil and endured neither
sorrow nor pain! Have they not reason, think you, to value themselves
for such things as these, and to speak as they are wont when they
style themselves immortals and equals to gods?--and when, through the
excessiveness and transcendency of the blessed things they enjoy, they
rave even to the degree of whooping and hollowing for very satisfaction
that, to the shame of all mortals, they have been the only men that
could find out this celestial and divine good that lies in an exemption
from all evil? So that their beatitude differs little from that of swine
and sheep, while they place it in a mere tolerable and contented state,
either of the body, or of the mind upon the body's account. For even the
more prudent and more ingenious sort of brutes do not esteem escaping
of evil their last end; but when they have taken their repast, they are
disposed next by fullness to singing, and they divert themselves