The quotation from Lucretius at the close is fantastically irrelevant, especially when traced to its original connection — a passage (about the colour of bodies of matter) too abstruse and abstract to give any account of here. Munro translates these lines: “For whenever a thing changes and quits its proper limits, at once this change of state is the death of that which was before.”
DEMADES the Athenian condemned a man of his city, whose trade was selling the things necessary for burials, on the ground that he demanded too large a profit, and that this profit could not accrue to him without the death of many people.[1] This judgement seems to be ill-advised, because no profit is made save at a loss to some one else, and by such reckoning we should have to condemn every sort of gain. The merchant succeeds in his business only by the unthriftiness of the youth; the farmer, by the high price of grains; the architect, by the falling to pieces of houses; the officers of the law, by men’s litigation and quarrels; the very honour and functions of the ministers of religion are derived from our deaths and from our vices. No physician takes pleasure in the good health even of his friends, said the old Greek comedy-writer,[2] nor any soldier in the peace of his city; and so with the rest. And, what is worse, let any man search his own heart, and he will find that our inmost desires are for the most part born and fed at another’s expense. Considering which, the fancy came to me that Nature does not herein belie her general policy; for physicists hold that the birth, nourishment, and increase of every thing is the change and decay of something else.
Nam quodcunque suis mutatum finibus exit,
Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante.[3]
