of man that caused many of them, either on the one hand, to be sour
and morose, supercilious and untreatable, or, on the other, to fall
into the vulgar pursuits of common men, to hunt after greatness and
riches, to make their court and to serve occasions, as Plato did to
the younger Dionysius, and Aristotle to Alexander the Great. So
impossible it is for a man who looks no further than the present
world to fix himself long in a contemplation where the present world
has no part; he has no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never
expect to remove the earth he rests upon while he has no support
besides for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place
whereon to stand. To talk of bearing pain and grief without any
sort of present or future hope cannot be purely greatness of spirit;
there must be a mixture in it of affectation and an alloy of pride,
or perhaps is wholly counterfeit.

It is true there has been all along in the world a notion of rewards
and punishments in another life, but it seems to have rather served
as an entertainment to poets or as a terror of children than a
settled principle by which men pretended to govern any of their
actions. The last celebrated words of Socrates, a little before his
death, do not seem to reckon or build much upon any such opinion;
and Caesar made no scruple to disown it and ridicule it in open
senate.

Thirdly, the greatest and wisest of all their philosophers were
never able to give any satisfaction to others and themselves in
their notions of a deity. They were often extremely gross and
absurd in their conceptions, and those who made the fairest
conjectures are such as were generally allowed by the learned to
have seen the system of Moses, if I may so call it, who was in great