with
swimming and flying; and their gayety and sprightliness prompt them to
entertain themselves with attempting to counterfeit all sorts of voices
and notes; and then they make their caresses to one another, by skipping
and dancing one towards another; nature inciting them, after they have
escaped evil, to look after some good, or rather to shake off what
they find uneasy and disagreeing, as an impediment to their pursuit of
something better and more congenial.

For what we cannot be without deserves not the name of good; but that
which claims our desire and preference must be something beyond a bare
escape from evil. And so, by Jove, must that be too that is either
agreeing or congenial to us, according to Plato, who will not allow
us to give the name of pleasures to the bare departures of sorrows and
pains, but would have us look upon them rather as obscure draughts and
mixtures of agreeing and disagreeing, as of black and white, while
the extremes would advance themselves to a middle temperament. But
oftentimes unskilfulness and ignorance of the true nature of extreme
occasions some to mistake the middle temperament for the extreme and
outmost part. Thus do Epicurus and Metrodorus, while they make avoiding
of evil to be the very essence and consummation of good, and so receive
but as it were the satisfaction of slaves or of rogues newly discharged
the jail, who are well enough contented if they may but wash and supple
their sores and the stripes they received by whipping, but never in
their lives had one taste or sight of a generous, clean, unmixed and
unulcerated joy. For it follows not that, if it be vexatious to have
one's body itch or one's eyes to run, it must be therefore a blessing to
scratch one's self, and to wipe one's eye with a rag; nor that, if it
be bad to be dejected or dismayed at divine matters or to be discomposed
with the relations of hell, therefore the bare avoiding of all this
must be some happy and amiable thing. The truth is, these men's opinion,
though it pretends so far to outgo that of the vulgar, allows their
joy but a straight and narrow compass to toss and tumble in, while it
extends it but to an exemption from the fear of hell, and so makes that
the top of acquired wisdom which is doubtless natural to the brutes.
For if freedom from bodily pain be still the same, whether it come by
endeavor or by nature, neither then is an undisturbed state of mind the
greater for being attained to by