pursuer of virtue, such an enemy to pleasure, that though he set hard
rules for men to undergo, much pain, many watchings, and other rigors,
yet did not at the same time advise them to do all they could in order to
relieve and ease the miserable, and who did not represent gentleness and
good-nature as amiable dispositions. And from thence they infer that if
a man ought to advance the welfare and comfort of the rest of mankind
(there being no virtue more proper and peculiar to our nature than to
ease the miseries of others, to free from trouble and anxiety, in
furnishing them with the comforts of life, in which pleasure consists)
Nature much more vigorously leads them to do all this for himself. A
life of pleasure is either a real evil, and in that case we ought not to
assist others in their pursuit of it, but, on the contrary, to keep them
from it all we can, as from that which is most hurtful and deadly; or if
it is a good thing, so that we not only may but ought to help others to
it, why, then, ought not a man to begin with himself? since no man can be
more bound to look after the good of another than after his own; for
Nature cannot direct us to be good and kind to others, and yet at the
same time to be unmerciful and cruel to ourselves. Thus as they define
virtue to be living according to Nature, so they imagine that Nature
prompts all people on to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do.
They also observe that in order to our supporting the pleasures of life,
Nature inclines us to enter into society; for there is no man so much
raised above the rest of mankind as to be the only favourite of Nature,
who, on the contrary, seems to have placed on a level all those that
belong to the same species. Upon this they infer that no man ought to
seek his own conveniences so eagerly as to prejudice others; and
therefore they think that not only all agreements between private persons
ought to be observed, but likewise that all those laws ought to be kept
which either a good prince has published in due form, or to which a
people that is neither oppressed with tyranny nor circumvented by fraud