eady by the very anticipation. And insensibility afflicts
not those that are not, but those that are, when they think what
damage they shall sustain by it in the loss of their being and in being
suffered never to emerge from nothingness. Wherefore it is neither
the dog Cerberus nor the river Cocytus that has made our fear of death
boundless; but the threatened danger of not being, representing it as
impossible for such as are once extinct to shift back again into being.
For we cannot be born twice, and our not being must last forever; as
Epicurus speaks. For if our end be in not being, and that be infinite
and unalterable, then hath privation of good found out an eternal evil,
to wit, a never ending insensibleness. Herodotus was much wiser, when he
said that God, having given men a taste of the delights of life, seems
to be envious, (Herodotus, vii. 46) and especially to those that conceit
themselves happy, to whom pleasure is but a bait for sorrow, they being
but permitted to taste of what they must be deprived of. For what solace
or fruition or exultation would not the perpetual injected thought of
the soul's being dispersed into infinity, as into a certain huge and
vast ocean, extinguish and quell in those that found their amiable good
and beatitude in pleasure? But if it be true (as Epicurus thinks it is)
that most men die in very acute pain, then is the fear of death in all
respects inconsolable; it bringing us through evils unto a deprivation
of good.

And yet they are never wearied with their brawling and dunning of all
persons to take the escape of evil for a good, no longer to repute
privation of good for an evil. But they still confess what we have
asserted, that death hath in it nothing of either good hope or solace,
but that all that is complacent and good is then wholly extinguished;
at which time those men look for many amiable, great, and divine things,
that conceive the minds of men to be unperishable and immortal, or at
least to go about in certain long revolutions of times, being one while
upon earth and another while in heaven, until they are at last dissolved
with the universe and then, together with the sun and moon, sublimed
into an intellective fire. So large a field and one of so great
pleasures Epicurus wholly cuts off, when he destroys (as hath been
said) the hopes and graces we should derive from the gods, and by that
extinguishes both in our speculative capacity the desire of knowledge,
and i