industry than if it came by nature.
Though a man may with good reason maintain that to be the more confirmed
habit of the mind which naturally admits of no disorder, than that which
by application and judgment eschews it.

But let us suppose them both equal; they will yet appear not one jot
superior to the beasts for being unconcerned at the stories of hell
and the legends of the gods, and for not expecting endless sorrows and
everlasting torments hereafter. For it is Epicurus himself that tells
us that, had our surmises about heavenly phenomena and our foolish
apprehensions of death and the pains that ensue it given us no disquiet,
we had not then needed to contemplate nature for our relief. For neither
have the brutes any weak surmises of the gods or fond opinion about
things after death to disorder themselves with; nor have they as much as
imagination or notion that there is anything in these to be dreaded. I
confess, had they left us the benign providence of God as a presumption,
wise men might then seem, by reason of their good hopes from thence, to
have something towards a pleasurable life that beasts have not. But now,
since they have made it the scope of all their discourses of God that
they may not fear him, but may be eased of all concern about him, I much
question whether those that never thought at all of him have not this in
a more confirmed degree than they that have learned to think he can do
no harm. For if they were never freed from superstition, they never fell
into it; and if they never laid aside a disturbing conceit of God, they
never took one up. The like may be said as to hell and the future state.
For though neither the Epicurean nor the brute can hope for any good
thence; yet such as have no forethought of death at all cannot but be
less amused and scared with what comes after it than they that betake
themselves to the principle that death is nothing to us. But something
to them it must be, at least so far as they concern themselves to reason
about it and contemplate it; but the beasts are wholly exempted from
thinking of what appertains not to them; and if they fly from blows,
wounds, and slaughters, they fear no more in death than is dismaying to
the Epicurean himself.

Such then are the things they boast to have attained by their
philosophy. Let us now see what those are they deprive themselves of and
chase away from them. For those diffusions of the mind that arise
from the body, and the p