attained, would satisfy our desire. For there are many consequences of life that make men fling away life, as disease, excessive pain, storms, so that it is clear that, if one were given the power of choice, not to be born at all would, as far at least as these reasons go, have been desirable. Further, the life we lead as children is not desirable,[1] for no one in his senses would consent to return again to this. Further, many incidents involving neither pleasure nor pain or involv- ing pleasure but not of a noble kind are such that, as far as they are concerned, non-existence is preferable to life. And generally, if one were to bring together all that all men do and experience but not willingly because not for its own sake, and were to add to this an existence of infinite duration, one would none the more on account of these experiences choose existence rather than non-existence. But further, neither for the pleasure of eating alone or that of sex, if all the other pleasures were removed that knowing or seeing or any other sense provides men with, would a single man value existence, unless he were utterly servile, for it is clear that to the man making this choice there would be no differ- ence between being born a brute and a man ; at any rate the ox in Egypt, which they reverence as Apis, in most of such matters has more power than many monarchs. We may say the same of the pleasure of sleeping. For what is the difference between sleeping an unbroken sleep from one's first day to one's last, say for a thousand or any number of years, and living the life of a plant ? Plants at any rate seem to possess this sort of existence, and similarly children ; for children, too, continue having their nature from their first coming into being in their mother's womb, but sleep the entire time. It is clear then from these considerations that men, though they look, fail to see what is well-being, what is the good in life.
And so they tell us that Anaxagoras answered a man who was raising problems of this sort and asking why one should choose rather to be born than not — 'for the sake of
34: cf. E. N. 1095b 19 sq.
- ↑ Omitting τίς and the note of interrogation.
