146 cook's first voyage june, 



places of worship. Upon this occasion it may be ob- 

 served, that nothing can be more absurd than the no- 

 tion that the happiness or misery of a future life 

 depends, in any degree, upon the disposition of the 

 body when the state of probation is past; yet that 

 nothing is more general than a solicitude about it. 

 However cheap we may hold any funeral rites which 

 custom has not familiarized, or superstition rendered 

 sacred, most men gravely deliberate how to prevent 

 their body from being broken by the mattock and 

 devoured by the worm, when it is no longer capable 

 of sensation ; and purchase a place for it in holy 

 ground, when they believe the lot of its future exist- 

 ence to be irrevocably determined. So strong is the 

 association of pleasing or painful ideas with certain 

 opinions and actions which affect us while we live, 

 that we involuntarily act as if it was equally certain 

 that they would affect us in the same manner when 

 we are dead, though this is an opinion that nobody 

 will maintain. Thus it happens, that the desire of 

 preserving from reproach even the name that we leave 

 behind us, or of procuring it honour, is one of the 

 most powerful principles of action, among the inha- 

 bitants of the most speculative andenlightenednations. 

 Posthumous reputation, upon every principle, must be 

 acknowledged to have no influence upon the dead ; yet 

 the desire of obtaining and securing it, no force of rea- 

 son, no habits of thinking, can subdue, except in those 

 whom habitual baseness and guilt have rendered in- 

 different to honour and shame while they lived. This, 

 indeed, seems to be among the happy imperfections 

 of our nature, upon which the general good of society 

 in a certain measure depends ; for as some crimes are 

 supposed to be prevented by hanging the body of the 

 criminal in chains after he is dead, so in consequence 

 of the same association of ideas, much good is pro- 

 cured to society, and much evil prevented, by a de- 

 sire of preventing disgrace or procuring honour to a 

 name, when nothing but a name remains. 



