most
ordinary practice for the diseases of the mind:

"Abducendus etiam nonnunquam animus est ad alia studia,
sollicitudines, curas, negotia: loci denique mutatione,
tanquam aegroti non convalescentes, saepe curandus est."

["The mind is sometimes to be diverted to other studies, thoughts,
cares, business: in fine, by change of place, as where sick persons
do not become convalescent."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 35.]

'Tis to little effect directly to jostle a man's infirmities; we neither
make him sustain nor repel the attack; we only make him decline and evade
it.

This other lesson is too high and too difficult: 'tis for men of the
first form of knowledge purely to insist upon the thing, to consider and
judge it; it appertains to one sole Socrates to meet death with an
ordinary countenance, to grow acquainted with it, and to sport with it;
he seeks no consolation out of the thing itself; dying appears to him a
natural and indifferent accident; 'tis there that he fixes his sight and
resolution, without looking elsewhere. The disciples of Hegesias, who
starved themselves to death, animated thereunto by his fine lectures, and
in such numbers that King Ptolemy ordered he should be forbidden to
entertain his followers with such homicidal doctrines, did not consider
death in itself, neither did they judge of it; it was not there they
fixed their thoughts; they ran towards and aimed at a new being.

The poor wretches whom we see brought upon the scaffold, full of ardent
devotion, and therein, as much as in them lies, employing all their
senses, their ears in hearing the instructions given them, their eyes and
hands lifted up towards heaven, their voices in loud prayers, with a
vehement and continual emotion, do doubtless things very commendable and
proper for such a necessity: we ought to commend them for their devotion,
but not properly for their constancy; they shun the encounter, they
divert their thoughts from the consideration of death, as children are
amused with some toy or other when the surgeon is going to give them a
prick with his lancet. I have seen some, who, casting their eyes upon
the dreadful instruments of death round about, have fainted, and
furiously turned their thoughts another way; such as are to pass a
formidable precipice are advised either to shut their eyes or to look
another way.

Subrius Flavius, being by Nero's command to be put to death, and b