
The willingness to call everything into question and the determination to accept nothing less than an adequate account of the nature of things makes you the first clear exponent of critical philosophy.
We shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things:
Death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness. As men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.
For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.
Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good.
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