respects, abounds with sublime truths. If your slave destroys
himself, says Socrates to Cebes, would you not punish him, for
having unjustly deprived you of your property; {73} prithee, good
Socrates, do we not belong to God after we are dead? The case you
put is not applicable; you ought to argue thus: if you incumber your
slave with a habit which confines him from discharging his duty
properly, will you punish him for quitting it, in order to render
you better service? the grand error lies in making life of too great
importance; as if our existence depended upon it, and that death was
a total annihilation. Our life is of no consequence in the sight of
God; it is of no importance in the eyes of reason, neither ought it
to be of any in our sight; when we quit our body, we only lay aside
an inconvenient habit. Is this circumstance so painful, to be the
occasion of so much disturbance? My Lord, these declaimers are not
in earnest. Their arguments are absurd and cruel, for they aggravate
the supposed crime, as if it put a period to existence, and they
punish it, as if that existence was eternal.

     With respect to Plato's Phaedo, which has furnished them with
the only specious argument that has ever been advanced, the question
{74} is discussed there in a very light and desultory manner.
Socrates being condemned, by an unjust judgment, to lose his life in
a few hours, had no occasion to enter into an accurate enquiry
whether he was at liberty to dispose of it himself. Supposing him
really to have been the author of those discourses which Plato
ascribes to him, yet believe me, my lord, he would have meditated
with more attention on the subject, had he been in circumstances
which required him to reduce his speculations to practice; and a
strong proof that no valid objection can be drawn from that immortal
work against the right of disposing of our own lives, is, that Cato
read it twice through the very night that he destroyed himself.

     The same sophisters make it a question whether life can ever be
an evil? but when we consider the multitude of errors, torments, and
vices, with which it abounds, one would rather be inclined to doubt
whether it can ever be a blessing. Guilt incessantly besieges the
most virtuous of mankind. Every moment he lives he is in danger of
falling a prey to the wicked, or of being wicked himself. To {75}
struggle and to endure, is his lot in this world; that of the
dishonest man is to do evil, and to suffer. In every other
particular they differ, and only agree in sharing the miseries of
life in common. If you required authorities and facts, I could
recite you the oracles of old, the answers of the sages, and produce
instances where acts of virtue have been recompensed with death. But
let us leave these considerations, my lord; it is to you whom I
address myself, and I ask you what is the chief attention of a wise
man in this life, except, if I may be allowed the expression, to
collect himself inwardly, and endeavour, even while he lives, to be
dead to every object of sense? The only way by which wisdom directs
us to avoid the miseries of human nature, is it not to detach
ourselves from all earthly objects, from every thing that is gross
in our composition, to retire within ourselves, and to raise our
thoughts to sublime contemplations? If therefore our misfortunes are
derived from our passions and errors, with what eagerness should we
wish for a state which will deliver us both from the one and the
other? What is {76} the fate of those sons of sensuality, who
indiscreetly multiply their torments by their pleasures? they in
fact destroy their existence by extending their connections in this
life; they increase the weight of their crimes by their numerous
attachments; they relish no enjoyments, but what are succeeded by a
thousand bitter wants; the more lively their sensibility, the more
acute their sufferings; the stronger they are attached to life, the
more wretched they become.

     But admitting it, in general, a benefit to mankind to crawl
upon the earth with gloomy sadness, I do not mean to intimate that
the human race ought with one common consent to destroy themselves,
and make the world one immense grave. But there are miserable
beings, who are too much exalted to be governed by vulgar opinion;
to them despair and grievous torments are the passports of nature.
It would be as ridiculous to suppose that life can be a blessing to
such men, as it was absurd in the sophister Possidonius to deny that
is was an {77} evil, at the same time that he endured all the
torments of the gout. While life is agreeable to us, we earnestly
wish to prolong it, and nothing but a sense of extreme misery can
extinguish the desire of existence; for we naturally conceive a
violent dread of death, and this dread conceals the miseries of
human nature from our sight. We drag a painful and melancholy life,
for a long time before we can resolve to quit it; but when once life
becomes so insupportable as to overcome the horror of death, then
existence is evidently a great evil, and we cannot disengage
ourselves from it too soon. Therefore, though we cannot exactly
ascertain the point at which it ceases to be a blessing, yet at
least we are certain in that it is an evil long before it appears to
be such, and with every sensible man the right of quitting life is,
by a great deal, precedent to the temptation.

     This is not all. After they have denied that life can be an
evil, in order to bar our right of making away with ourselves; they
confess immediately afterwards that it is an {78} evil, by
reproaching us with want of courage to support it. According to
them, it is cowardice to withdraw ourselves from pain and trouble,
and there are none but dastards who destroy themselves. O Rome, thou
victrix of the world, what a race of cowards did thy empire produce!
Let Arria, Eponina, Lucretia, be of the number; they were women. But
Brutus, Cassius, and thou great and divine Cato, who didst share
with the gods the adoration of an astonished world, thou whose
sacred and august presence animated the Romans with holy zeal, and
made tyrants tremble, little did thy proud admirers imagine that
paltry rhetoricians, immured in the dusty corner of a college, would