With these hopes, Socrates
warmed his doubtful spirits against that cold potion;
and Cato, before he durst give the fatal stroke, spent part
of the night in reading the Immortality of Plato, thereby
confirming his wavering hand unto the animosity of
that attempt.
It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at
a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or
that there is no further state to come, unto which
this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain.
Without this accomplishment, the natural expectation
and desire of such a state, were but a fallacy in nature;
unsatisfied considerators would quarrel the justice of
their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had
fallen lower; whereby, by knowing no other original,
and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have
enjoyed the happiness of inferior creatures, who in
tranquillity possess their constitutions, as having not
the apprehension to deplore their own natures, and,
being framed below the circumference of these hopes,
or cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath
necessitated their contentment: but the superior in-
gredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all
present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be
able at last to tell us, we are more than our present
selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their
own accomplishments.
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