The divine life in three treatises

Object. But there is a middle state of life betwixt the sensual and the Divine or Holy Life which sober Philosophers did live, and this is the most Natural Life, and most properly so called.

Answ. I deny this: There is no middle state of life, if you denominate the several states of life, from the several Ends, or the several Powers. I grant that the very sensitive powers in man, especially the imagination, is much advanced by the conjunction of Reason, above that of a brute: And I grant that the Delights of the Fantasy may be preferred before the immediate pleasure of the senses: And I grant that some little distant knowledge of God, and things Divine, and Hopes of attaining them, may affect an unsanctified man with an answerable pleasure. But all this is nothing to prove that there is a third sort of End, or of Powers, and so a third or middle state of life, specifically distinct from the sensitive and the Holy life. Besides, the Vegetative man hath no other life or faculties, than the Sensitive and the Rational: And therefore one of these must be in predominancy or rule. And therefore he can have no middle sort or End; and therefore no middle state of life, that can be said to be agreeable to his nature. Those that seek and take up their chief felicity in Riches and plenty, and provisions for the flesh, though not in present pleasing of the sense, do live but the life of sensuality. A Fox or Dog takes pleasure when he hath eaten his belly full, to hide and lay up the rest: And so doth the Bee to fill the Hive, and make provision for the Winter. The Proud that delight in Honour and applause, and making others subject to their lusts, do live but the life of sensuality: A Dog, a Horse, and other brutes, have something of the same. They that are grave through Melancholy, or because they can reach no great matter in the world, and because their old or duller spirits are not much pleased with juvenile delights, and so live retiredly, and ⟨p. 239⟩seek no higher pleasure or felicity, but only sit down with the weeping or the laughing Philosopher, lamenting or deriding the Vanity of the world, do yet live no other than a sensual life: as an old Dog that hath no pleasure in hunting or playfulness, as he had when he was a Whelp. Only he is less deluded and less vain, than other sensualists that find more pleasure in their course.