course to begin at the body, where they observe pleasure to have
its first rise, and thence to pass to the mind as the more stable
and sure part, there to complete and crown the whole?

They do, by Jove, I said; and if, after removing thither they have
indeed found something more consummate than before, a course too as
well agreeing with nature as becoming men adorned with both
contemplative and civil knowledge. But if after all this you still
hear them cry out, and protest that the mind of man can receive no
satisfaction or tranquillity from anything under Heaven but the
pleasures of the body either in possession or expectance, and that
these are its proper and only good, can you forbear thinking they
make use of the soul but as a funnel for the body, while they
mellow their pleasure by shifting it from one vessel to another, as
they rack wine out of an old and leaky vessel into a new one and
there let it grow old, and then imagine they have performed some
extraordinary and very fine thing? True indeed, a fresh pipe may
both keep and recover wine that hath thus been drawn off; but the
mind, receiving but the remembrance only of past pleasure, like a
kind of scent, retains that and no more. For as soon as it hath
given one hiss in the body, it immediately expires, and that little
of it that stays behind in the memory is but flat and like a queasy
fume: as if a man should lay up and treasure in his fancy what he
either ate or drank yesterday, that he may have recourse to that
when he wants fresh fare. See now how much more temperate the
Cyrenaics are, who, though they have drunk out of the same bottle
with Epicurus, yet will not allow men so much as to practise their
amours by candlelight, but only under the covert of the dark, for
fear seeing should fasten too quick an impression of the images of
such actions upon the fancy and thereby too frequently inflame the