Sir William {Temple 81 



greatest happiness, and the best of the Epi- 

 cureans made the greatest pleasure to consist 

 in virtue ; and the difference between these two 

 seems not easily discovered. All agreed, the 

 greatest temper, if not the total subduing of 

 passion, and exercise of reason, to be the state 

 of the greatest felicity ; to live without desires 

 or fears, or those perturbations of mind and 

 thought which passions raise ; to place true 

 riches in wanting little, rather than in possess- 

 ing much ; and true pleasure in temperance, 

 rather than in satisfying the senses ; to live 

 with indifference to the common enjoyments 

 and accidents of life, and with constancy upon 

 the greatest blows of fate or of chance ; not to 

 disturb our minds with sad reflections upon 

 what is past, nor with anxious cares or raving 

 hopes about what is to come ; neither to 

 disquiet life with the fears of death, nor death 

 with the desires of life ; but in both, and in all 

 things else, to follow nature, seem to be the 

 precepts most agreed among them. 



Thus reason seems only to have been called 

 in to allay those disorders which itself had 

 raised, to cure its own wounds, and pretends to 

 make us wise no other way than by rendering 

 us insensible. This at least was the profession 

 of many rigid Stoics, who would have had a 

 wise man, not only without any sort of passion, 



