Poor virtue! thou wast but a name, and mere jest,[p. 169] and for thee have I quitted injustice, the way to wealth, and excess, the parent of all true pleasure,—these are the thoughts that call at once for our pity and indignation; for they will engender swarms of diseases, like fly-blows and vermin, in our minds.
And I, choust fool, did practise thee in earnest,
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Our great ignorance of the Divine Beings most naturally runs in two streams; whereof the one in harsh and coarse
tempers, as in dry and stubborn soils, produces atheism,
and the other in the more tender and flexible, as in moist
and yielding grounds, produces superstition. Indeed, every
wrong judgment, in matters of this nature especially, is
a great unhappiness to us; but it is here attended with a
passion, or disorder of the mind, of a worse consequence
than itself. For every such passion is, as it were, an error
inflamed. And as a dislocation is the more painful when
it is attended with a bruise, so are the perversions of our
understandings, when attended with passion. Is a man of
opinion that atoms and a void were the first origins of
things? It is indeed a mistaken conceit, but makes no
ulcer, no shooting, no searching pain. But is a man of
opinion that wealth is his last good? This error contains
in it a canker; it preys upon a man's spirits, it transports
him, it suffers him not to sleep, it makes him horn-mad, it
carries him over headlong precipices, strangles him, and
makes him unable to speak his mind. Are there some
again, that take virtue and vice for substantial bodies?
This may be sottish conceit indeed, but yet it bespeaks
neither lamentations nor groans. But such opinions and
conceits as these,—
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