“Remember also, that if you go into the world you will have free will; that you will be obliged to have it; that there is no escaping it; that you will be fettered to it during your whole life, and must on every occasion do that which on the whole seems best to you at any given time, no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing it.  Your mind will be a balance for considerations, and your action will go with the heavier scale.  How it shall fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you may have drawn at birth, the bias which they will have obtained by use, and the weight of the immediate considerations.  If the scales were good to start with, and if they have not been outrageously tampered with in childhood, and if the combinations into which you enter are average ones, you may come off well; but there are too many ‘ifs’ in this, and with the failure of any one of them your misery is assured.  Reflect on this, and remember that should the ill come upon you, you will have yourself to thank, for it is your own choice to be born, and there is no compulsion in the matter.

“Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there is a certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to very considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a man’s life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few indeed to the after.  Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the miseries of a decrepit age?  If you are good, strong, and handsome, you have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at sixty?  For you must live on your capital; there is no investing your powers so that you may get a small annuity of life for ever:  you must eat up your principal bit by bit, and be tortured by seeing it grow continually smaller and smaller, even though you happen to escape being rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty.

“Remember, too, that there never yet was a man of forty who would not come back into the world of the unborn if he could do so with decency and honour.  Being in the world he will as a general rule stay till he is forced to go; but do you think that he would consent to be born again, and re-live his life, if he had the offer of doing so?  Do not think it.  If he could so alter the past as that he should never have come into being at all, do you not think that he would do it very gladly?

“What was it that one of their own poets meant, if it was not this, when he cried out upon the day in which he was born, and the night in which it was said there is a man child conceived?  ‘For now,’ he says, ’I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept; then had I been at rest with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or as an hidden untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw light.  There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’  Be very sure that the guilt of being born carries this punishment at times to all men; but how can they ask for pity, or complain of any mischief that may befall them, having entered open-eyed into the snare?