quite obstructs the comfort and solace of the grave and wise and
those that abound with good things, by throwing them down from a
happy living into a deprivation of both life and being. From
hence then it is manifest, that the contemplation of the loss of
good things will afflict us in as great a measure as either the
firm hope or present enjoyment of them delights us.

Yea, themselves tell us, that the thought of future dissolution
leaves them one most assured and complacent good, freedom from
anxious surmises of incessant and endless evils, and that
Epicurus's doctrine effects this by stopping the fear of death
through the soul's dissolution. If then deliverance from the
expectation of infinite evils be a matter of greatest complacence,
how comes it not to be afflictive to be bereft of eternal good
things and to miss of the highest and most consummate felicity?
For not to be can be good for neither condition, but is on the
contrary both against nature and ungrateful to all that have a
being. But those being eased of the evils of life through the
evils of death have, it is very true, the want of sense to comfort
them, while they, as it were, make their escape from life.
But, on the other hand, they that change from good things to
nothing seem to me to have the most dismaying end of all, it
putting a period to their happiness. For Nature doth not fear
insensibility as the entrance upon some new thing, but because it
is the privation of our present good things. For to declare that
the destruction of all that we call ours toucheth us not is untrue
for it toucheth us already 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