Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Pain

The brute animals have all the same sensations of pain as human beings, and, consequently, endure as much pain when their body is hurt; but in their case the cruelty of torment is greater, because they have no mind to bear them up against their sufferings, and no hope to look forward to when enduring the last extreme of pain, their happiness consisting entirely in present enjoyment.

God hath scattered several degrees of pleasure and pain in all the things that environ and affect us, and blended them together in almost all our thoughts.

Possidonius being extremely troubled with a sharp and painful disease, Pompeius came to visit him, excusing himself that he had taken so unseasonable a time to come to hear him discourse of philosophy: “God forbid,” said Possidonius to him again, “that pain should ever have the power to hinder me from talking;” and thereupon fell immediately upon a discourse of the contempt of pain: but in the meantime his own infirmity was playing its part, and plagu’d him to the purpose; to which he cry’d out, “thou may’st work thy will, pain, and torment me with all the power thou hast, but thou shall never make me say that thou art an evil.” This story that they make such a clatter withal, what is there in it, I fain would know, to the contempt of pain? It only fights it with words, and in the meantime, if the shootings and dolours he felt did not move him, why did he interrupt his discourse? Why did he fancy he did so great a thing in forbearing to confess it an evil? All does not here consist in the imagination: our fancies may work upon other things; but this here is a certain science that is playing its part, of which our senses themselves are judge.

Pain itself is not without its alleviations. It may be violent and frequent, but it is seldom both violent and long-continued; and its pauses and intermissions become positive pleasures. It has the power of shedding a satisfaction over intervals of ease, which, I believe, few enjoyments exceed.