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