ke from others
when he may come to need it, so if that should fail him, yet the sense
of a good action, and the reflections that he makes on the love and
gratitude of those whom he has so obliged, gives the mind more pleasure
than the body could have found in that from which it had restrained
itself. They are also persuaded that God will make up the loss of those
small pleasures, with a vast and endless joy, of which religion easily
convinces a good soul.

Thus upon an inquiry into the whole matter, they reckon that all our
actions, and even all our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in our
chief end and greatest happiness; and they call every motion or state,
either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to delight, a
pleasure. Thus they cautiously limit pleasure only to those appetites to
which Nature leads us; for they say that Nature leads us only to those
delights to which reason as well as sense carries us, and by which we
neither injure any other person, nor lose the possession of greater
pleasures, and of such as draw no troubles after them; but they look
upon those delights which men by a foolish, though common, mistake call
pleasure, as if they could change as easily the nature of things as the
use of words; as things that greatly obstruct their real happiness,
instead of advancing it, because they so entirely possess the minds of
those that are once captivated by them with a false notion of pleasure,
that there is no room left for pleasures of a truer or purer kind.

There are many things that in themselves have nothing that is truly
delightful; on the contrary, they have a good deal of bitterness in
them; and yet from our perverse appetites after forbidden objects, are
not only ranked among the pleasures, but are made even the greatest
designs of life. Among those who pursue these sophisticated pleasures,
they reckon such as I mentioned before, who think themselves really the
better for having fine clothes; in which they think they are doubly
mistaken, both in the opinion that they have of their clothes, and in
that they have of themselves; for if you consider the use of clothes,
why should a fine thread be thought better than a coarse one? And yet
these men, as if they had some real advantages beyond others, and did
not owe them wholly to their mistakes, look big, seem to fancy
themselves to be more valuable, and imagine that a respect is due to
them for the sake of a rich garment, to which they would