“Omnia quae secundum naturam sunt, aestimatione digna sunt.”
[“All things that are according to nature are worthy of esteem.”
—Cicero, De Fin., iii. 6.]
Of philosophical opinions, I preferably embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, the most human and most our own: my discourse is, suitable to my manners, low and humble: philosophy plays the child, to my thinking, when it puts itself upon its Ergos to preach to us that ‘tis a barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honest with the dishonest. That pleasure is a brutish quality, unworthy to be tasted by a wise man; that the sole pleasure he extracts from the enjoyment of a fair young wife is a pleasure of his conscience to perform an action according to order, as to put on his boots for a profitable journey. Oh, that its followers had no more right, nor nerves, nor vigour in getting their wives’ maidenheads than in its lesson.
This is not what Socrates says, who is its master and ours: he values, as he ought, bodily pleasure; but he prefers that of the mind as having more force, constancy, facility, variety, and dignity. This, according to him, goes by no means alone—he is not so fantastic—but only it goes first; temperance with him is the moderatrix, not the adversary of pleasure. Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.
“Intrandum est in rerum naturam, et penitus,
quid ea postulet, pervidendum.”
[“A man must search into the nature of things, and fully examine
what she requires.”—Cicero, De Fin., V. 16.]
I hunt after her foot throughout: we have confounded it with artificial traces; and that academic and peripatetic good, which is “to live according to it,” becomes on this account hard to limit and explain; and that of the Stoics, neighbour to it, which is “to consent to nature.” Is it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are necessary? And yet they will not take it out of my head, that it is not a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which, says an ancient, the gods always conspire. To what end do we dismember by divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a correspondence? Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices; let the mind rouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the levity of the soul:
“Qui, velut summum bonum, laudat animac naturam, et, tanquam malum,
naturam carnis accusat, profectd et animam carnatiter appetit, et
carnem carnaliter fugit; quoniam id vanitate sentit humans, non
veritate divina.”
[“He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and
condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally
desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels
thus from human vanity, not from divine truth.”
—St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, xiv. 5.]
In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; ‘tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place:
“Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter
facere, quae facienda sunt; et alio corpus impellere, alio animum;
distrahique inter diversissimos motus?”
[“Who will not say, that it is the property of folly, slothfully and
contumaciously to perform what is to be done, and to bend the body
one way and the mind another, and to be distracted betwixt wholly
different motions?”—Seneca, Ep., 74.]
To make this apparent, ask any one, some day, to tell you what whimsies and imaginations he put into his pate, upon the account of which he diverted his thoughts from a good meal, and regrets the time he spends in eating; you will find there is nothing so insipid in all the dishes at your table as this wise meditation of his (for the most part we had better sleep than wake to the purpose we wake); and that his discourses and notions are not worth the worst mess there. Though they were the ecstasies of Archimedes himself, what then? I do not here speak of, nor mix with the rabble of us ordinary men, and the vanity of the thoughts and desires that divert us, those venerable souls, elevated by the ardour of devotion and religion, to a constant and conscientious meditation of divine things, who, by the energy of vivid and vehement hope, prepossessing the use of the eternal nourishment, the final aim and last step of Christian desires, the sole constant, and incorruptible pleasure, disdain to apply themselves to our necessitous, fluid, and ambiguous conveniences, and easily resign to the body the care and use of sensual and temporal pasture; ‘tis a privileged study. Between ourselves, I have ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of singular accord.
AEsop, that great man, saw his master piss as he walked: “What then,” said he, “must we drop as we run?” Let us manage our time; there yet remains a great deal idle and ill employed. The mind has not willingly other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its necessity. They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humours affright me, like high and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation. Philotas pleasantly quipped him in his answer; he congratulated him by letter concerning the oracle of Jupiter Ammon, which had placed him amongst the gods: “Upon thy account I am glad of it, but the men are to be pitied who are to live with a man, and to obey him, who exceeds and is not contented with the measure of a man:”