The two first make anxiety. For, being assured that there be causes of all things that
have arrived hitherto or shall arrive hereafter, it is impossible for a man, who continually
endeavors to secure himself against the evil he fears and procure the good he desires, not
to be in a perpetual solicitude of the time to come; so that every man, especially those
that are over-provident, are in a state like to that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus,
which interpreted is “the prudent man,” was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large
prospect, where an eagle feeding on his liver devoured in the day as much as was
repaired in the night, so that man, which looks too far before him in the care of future
time, hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other
calamity, and has no repose nor pause of his anxiety but in sleep.
This perpetual fear, always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as
it were in the dark, must needs have for object something. And therefore, when there is
nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good or evil fortune, but
some ‘‘power” or agent “invisible” in which sense perhaps it was that some of the old
poets said that the gods were at first created by human fear; which spoken of the gods,
that is to say of the many gods of the Gentiles, is very true. But the acknowledging of
one God, eternal, infinite, and omnipotent, may more easily be derived, from the desire
men have to know the causes of natural bodies and their several virtues and operations,
than from the fear of what was to befall them in time to come. For he that from any
effect he sees come to pass should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and
from thence to the cause of that cause, and plunge himself profoundly in the pursuit of
causes, shall at last come to this, that there must be, as even the heathen philosophers
confessed, one first mover, that is, a first and an eternal cause of all things, which is that
which men mean by the name of God, and all this without thought of their fortune; the
solicitude whereof both inclines to fear and hinders them from the search of the causes
of other things, and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many gods as there be men
that feign them.
CHAPTER13. OF THENATURALCONDITION OFMANKIND
ASCONCERNINGTHEIRFELICITY ANDMISERY
Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind, as that, though
there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than
another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so
considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which
another may not pretend as well as he. For, as to the strength of body, the weakest has
strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy
with others that are in the same danger with himself.
And, as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words
and especially that skill of proceeding upon general and infallible rules called science,
which very few have and but in few things, as being not a native faculty born with us,
nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equal-
ity amongst men than that of strength. For prudence is but experience, which equal time
equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That
which may perhaps make such equality incredible is but a vain conceit of one’s own