iMWiiPt' -6 7 ^-v '/6e He. l-lfl)l> i>T, ;4 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/atheisminphilosoOOhedgrich Atheism in Philosophy, AND OTHER ESSAYS. BY FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE, AUTHOR OF ^ '* REASON IN RELIGION," " PRIMEVAL WORLD OF HEBREW TRADITION,'' "ways of the SPIRIT," ETC. BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. Copyright, 1884, By Roberts Brothers. JSniticrsitB Presg: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. CONTENTS. PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. Paqe Introduction 3 Epicurus 5 The Philosophy of Epicurus 24 Arthur Schopenhauer 51 Schopenhauer's Philosophy 70 Critique of Pessimism as taught by Eduard VON Hartmann 123 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. Life and Character of Augustine 145 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz 195 Leibniz's Philosophy 217 The Monadology of Leibniz 245 Immanuel Kant 271 Irony 306 The Philosophy of Fetichism 337 Genius 354 The Lords of Life 376 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. "Philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment ; but too much philo- sophy is the ruin of human life." — Callicles, i7i Plato s Gorgias. PHILOSOPHIC atheism; INTRODUCTION. "DY philosophic atheism I mean speculative ■■-^ denial of a supermundane, conscious intel- ligence, — theories of the universe which regard it as the product of blind force, or as a self- subsisting, self-governing, independent being. Of these theories, however repugnant to practical reason and religious faith, we are not authorized to- say with Milton, — " Of such doctrine never was there school But the heart of the fool, And no man therein doctor but himself." 2 Justice compels us to admit the claim of some who have reasoned thus, to be counted philoso- phers, — lovers of wisdom, seekers of truth. 1 Not to be confounded with the scientific atheism of the Posi- tivists. 2 Samson Agonistes, 297-299. 4 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. The moment we begin to speculate about the universe, there arises the question of origin. Phi- losophy, even atheistic philosophy, cannot stop short of the " primordia rerum ; " it wants to know '' unde Natura creet res, auctet alatque." The arch-atheist of antiquity could not rest in a given phenomenal world, but pushed his inquiry, says his great commentator,^ " extra flammantia moenia mundi." The question Whence ? is found to be involved in the questions What ? and How ? And here it is that philosophic atheists differ among themselves almost as widely as they dif- fer from theists. I select as illustrations two prominent examples, an ancient and a modern, representing two opposite types, — Epicurus and Schopenhauer. 1 Lucretius : De Rerum Natura, i. 73, 74. EPICURUS. EPICURUS. 'T^HERE are few philosophers, and indeed few -■- men, about whom such opposite opinions have been formed and such different judgments pro- nounced as those concerning Epicurus. To speak of him as an atheist at all, in the view of some, is to misrepresent him. There have not been wanting defenders of his philosophy who acquit it of that charge, and have even sought to adjust its principles with Christian doctrine. Prominent among them is Gassendi, who published toward the middle of the seventeenth century an elaborate account of Epicurus, entitled " De vita, moribus, et philosophia Epicuri ; " to which he afterward added " Animadversiones in Diogenem Laertium," the biographer of Epicurus, and also a " Synta- gma philosophias Epicuri." Among ancient critics, his best advocate was a leader of the sect most opposed to his own, — the Stoic Seneca. I call him an atheist in philosophy ; for though he recognizes the existence of the national gods, it is only as accidents, not as powers. He recog- nizes no divine agency in his system. His gods have no right to be, in the light of his philosophy. They have none of the attributes proper to deity; Y 6 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. they are chance collections of atoms, destined sooner or later, like all other creatures, to perish and dissolve. To him thev have only an ethical im- port. Finding them fixed in the popular belief, he uses them as illustrations of a blessed life. The testimony of the ancients is decisive on this subject. Lucretius makes it his special merit to have freed his followers from the yoke of religion.^ As to his morals, the authorities differ. Plu- tarch represents him as licentious ; but, on the whole, the balance of testimony gives the impres- sioii of a man who led a blameless, and unques- tionably a very frugal and abstemious, life. An Athenian by nation, he was born in Samos, where his father, as KXrjpovxo^, had settled him- self on his allotted estate, in the third year of the 109th Olympiad, about 342 b. c, on the seventh day of the month Gamelion.^ His father, Neocles, earned a meagre livelihood by giving instruction in reading and writing. His mother, Charestrata, added a little to the res angusta by lier magic arts ; being what would be called in modern times a for- tune-teller. Her social position was of the lowest ; but Epicurus says she had in her body all the atoms which go to make a philosopher. The only 1 De Rerum Natura, uU supra. 2 The marriage month, the seventh of the Attic year, com- prising part of January and part of February. EPICURUS. T memorable thing recorded of his boyhood is the well-known anecdote mentioned by ApoUodorus. His teacher was explaining the theogony of Hesiod, how everything sprang from original chaos. " But whence sprang chaos ? " the boy demanded. The question revealed an inquisitive mind. The chaos of Greek mythology seems to have served the same purpose as the tortoise of Hindu specula- tion. It was the ultimate ground, the foundation of all things. You must stop somewhere in your inquiry. With the Hindu the question was one of statics ; and he stopped with the big tortoise, which bears the elephant, which bears something else, which bears the world. With the Greek the question was one of genesis ; and he stopped with chaos : from that all things were made. But the boy Epicurus would not stop there. What made chaos? It was a boyish inquisitiveness, nothing more ; the man Epicurus found, after all, nothing better than chaos to begin with or end with. At the age of eighteen he first visited Athens, where it is thought he may have studied philos- ophy in the Old Academy. Plato had left it, and the city, and the world, a quarter of a century before ; but the school on the old Platonic founda- tion remained. It was run by Xenocrates. It is not very likely that Epicurus was admitted to its teachings. He probably wanted the qualification 8 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. of a knowledge of geometry, since he affected to despise mathematical science. But the Old Acad- emy met applicants for admission with the warn- ing, ^7]SeU ay€co/JL€Tp7]To<; elcriTco ; and Xenocrates is said to have been particularly strict in enforcing that condition. His stay in Athens at that time is supposed to have been shortened by political troubles, which forced him to rejoin his father, who was then a teacher at Colophon ; but that, too, was a brief sojourn. He followed for some years a vagabond life, studying and teaching in various places, found- ing schools at Mytilene and Lampsacus, over which he presided for several years. Finally, in 307 b. c, at the age of thirty-five, he returned to Athens, where he spent the remainder of his life. He had chosen his career. Philosophy claimed him, drew him; and if predetermination of will, and devotion of every faculty and means to that pursuit are proofs of vocation, a philosopher he was morally called to be. His intellectual quali- fications are not so apparent. His aptitude for transcendental speculation or fresh discovery in the realms of thought was small. Neither the intuitive nor the analytic faculty in him seems to have been constitutionally robust or happily de- veloped. His theory halts, and his logic stumbles. A consistent and intelligible view of the universe. EPICURUS. ^ 9 with or witliout a God, or a rational psychology, it was not in him to construct. He was equally deficient in the power of intellectual appropriation. He failed to comprehend the speculations of other men ; existing systems he had not the patience to fathom. He borrowed chiefly from Democritus, but travesties the Democritic theory which he uses. And because he was unable to master previous systems, he abuses their authors. He vilifies the thinkers of his day, as Schopenhauer does the thinkers of his. Cicero says of him : " Contume- liosissime Aristotelem vexavit, PliJEdoni Socratico turpissime maledixit." ^ Even Democritus, his master, does not escape his disparagement ; " in Democritum ipsum quern secutus est, ingratus." He seems to have imbibed little or nothing of the scientific culture of his time, which he af- fected to despise. Learning of every kind he treated with disdain. " Non satis politus," says Cicero, '' iis artibus quas qui tenent eruditi appel- lantur." TIacrav iraiheiav fiafcdptot (pevyere, '' Shun all learning, ye blessed ! " he writes in a letter to Pythocles ; reminding one of a certain other Epicurean, who declared that " much study is a weariness of the flesh," and that " he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." He nevertheless verified by his own example the 1 De Natura Deorum, i. 33. 10 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. confession of the Hebrew, that " of making many books there is no end ; " for he is said to have been one of the most voluminous of the writers of antiquity. " JToXfY/oat^coraro?," says Diogenes Laertius, his biographer. Three hundred vokimes are ascribed to him. They have not survived ; and if the fragment TJepl ^vaeo)^, discovered in Herculaneam and edited by Orelli, is a fair sam- ple, literature has suffered little by their loss. A prolific writer, but a poor scholar, in the great intellectual movement which distinguished his century above all preceding epochs he had no active, scarcely a passive, part. For him Plato had lived, and Aristotle was living, in vain. He boasted himself an autodidaktos, and disclaimed all indebtedness to those who preceded him. Yet as an ethicist he built on Socratic ground. He reverted to Socrates, just as Schopenhauer, repudiating Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, went back to Kant. Ritter regards his philosophy as an episode, an interpolation in Greek philosophy ; but Steinhart — more correctly, I think — recog- nizes in it a lineal offspring of the great Socratic movement. His abstinence from public affairs and the ser- vice of the state is ascribed by his partial biog- rapher, Diogenes Laertius, to extreme modesty. He had certainly what is called a retiring dispo- EPICURUS. 11 sition. Retirement was a cardinal point in his practical philosophy, the logical result of his fundamental principle, XdOe /Btcoaa^. " I never sought," he says, " to please the people ; for the things which I know, the populace disapproves, and the things which the populace approves, I am ignorant of." There might he other reasons for this abstinence. Since Athens had lost her independence, and Greece her political importance, men of talent were no longer in demand. The motive which once induced the ablest minds to engage in public affairs had ceased to operate. The state had no need of philosophy, and philos- ophy ignored the state. Having chosen Athens for his residence, and finding nothing congenial in other schools, Epi- curus adopted a course which characterizes the genius of the man, and which properly dates his philosopliic career. He purchased for eighty min^ (about $>300) a lot of land within the walls of the city, threw it open to the public, and gathered around him a society of intelligent men and women, who with him devoted them- selves to philosophic pursuits ; ^. c, to philosophic discussion and social converse. I say intelligent women. The women, it is true, so far as T can learn, belonged to the class of hefairai,^ — a 1 Literally companions; not al vays, but most commonly, con- cubines. 12 PMILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. class whom their own sex in most countries exclude from the pale of their society, but who seem in Athens to have occupied a less degrading position than elsewhere, and, what is singular, to have been the best educated and most agreeable women of the city. They are the only women one hears much about in Athenian history. Aspasia, as a foreigner, belonged tech- nically to this class, though not in the baser sense. With what right the kyj-ttol 'EiriKovpov were called a garden is not apparent. Of horticulture there is no record. Gassendi thinks the word took its name from the region of the city to which it belonged, — the Ktjttol. Pliny, on the other hand, in his " Natural History," testifies that Epi- curus introduced the custom of having gardens in the city. " Primus hoc instituit Epicurus otii magister. Usque ad eum, moris non fuerat, in oppidis habitari rura." It could not fail that the presence of women of the class I have named should give rise to scandalous reports concerning the morals of the school. Its enemies — some of them deserters from the company — wrote and circulated disgusting accounts of the manner of life and orgies of these philosophers, which have probably given rise to the bad repute which at- tached to the sect among the ancients, — to the EPICURUS. 13 " porci ex Epicuri grege." The curious in such matters may find the scandal recorded by Plu- tarch and Bayle, — recorded, not adopted. The best authorities entirely discredit all these alle- gations. The respectable opponents of Epicurus declare him free from all taint of licentiousness. Chrysippus the Stoic, his chief antagonist, who certainly would not have missed the opportunity of a credible accusation, not only exonerates, but pronounces him incapable of sensual passion. Cicero and Seneca vindicate his character, while condemning his doctrine. On the whole, it was a pure and beautiful life which those garden- philosophers lived, if not, as judged by Stoic and Christian standards, a very heroic one. An inscription at the entrance of the garden welcomed the visitor with the words : " Guest, it is good to be here ; here pleasure is the supreme good." And certainly there was never before, and has never been since, a pleasure party — a com- pany of men and women assembled for the purpose of enjoyment— whose views of enjoyment were so severe, and whose style of pleasure was so refined. " Spare Fast, that oft with Gods doth diet," was caterer to these voluptuaries ; Sobriety the butler that officiated at their carousals. " Here barley- cakes and fresh spring-water," the visitor was told, " are freely dispensed. The garden will not tempt 14 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. jovi with artificial delicacies, but will satisfy natural hunger with natural food. Will you not be well entertained?" "Such," exclaims our Greek Dry- asdust, ^ " was the man who taught that pleasure is the chief end," — TotovTo<^ rjv 6 ti-]v rjSovrjv elvat reXo^: SoyfjiaTL^wv. The trifling cost of this garden- life was defrayed by voluntary contributions from individuals thus associated. There was no commu- nity of goods, as with the Essenes and the Pyth- agoreans. There was no obligation on the rich to make common stock of their wealth, or even to bear their part of the expense. Epicurus dis- dained such enforced communism ; he viewed it as a sign of mistrust. True friends must have that confidence one toward another which without any formal institution would give them the vir- tual command of each other's goods. It was a kind of perennial picnic, where each contributed according to his humor. Never has the world seen finer examples of friendships based on intel- lectual affinity, never a society bound by sublimer trust Really, those Greeks had a style of their own beyond the capabilities of modern life. Ima- gine in some modern capital — say Paris or New York — a public garden offering pleasure as the supreme good, open to all classes and all repu- tations, and continuing for centuries to furnish 1 Diogenes Laertius. EPICURUS. 15 this sort of entertainment, and to draw high and low by the simple attraction of philosophic in- quiry. A remarkable feature of those conferences was the presence and participation of slaves ; and a beautiful trait in the character of Epicurus, noticed by Seneca, is his treatment of this class of fellow-beings, whom he called his friends, — thus proving his superiority to the prejudices of his age, and illustrating by his own example the humanity commended in his doctrine. " Habe- ant enim sane nomen quod illis Epicurus noster imposuit." ^ Besides this garden, in which most of his time was spent, he possessed, according to Diogenes Laertius, a house in another part of the city, in the demos Melite, — a house of small dimensions, but which his boundless hospitality and the strong attraction of his friendship filled witli guests. Cicero extols this characteristic of the man, — the high value he set on friendship, the place assigned to it in his theory of life and in his practice. T quote the passage from the " De Finibus : " ^ " Epicurus says of friendship, that of all the things which wisdom shall have provided for a happy life, there is none which surpasses friendship, nothing more fruitful, nothing more delightful (nihil esse majus amicitia, nihil uberius, nihil jucundius). And not with his words alone 1 Seneca, Ep. 107. 2 Lib. i. c 20. 16 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. maintained lie this, but far more with his hfe, with his deeds, with his manners. The significance of this fact may be inferred from ancient fiction. Many and various as are the stories which have come to us from the highest antiquity, there are found in them scarce three pairs of friends, from Theseus to Orestes. But Epicurus, in a single house, and that a small one, entertained what troops of friends bound together by how great a consent and conspiracy of love ! (Quam magnos, quantaque amoris conspiratione, consentientes tenuit amicorum greges !) And the Epicureans at the present day maintain the same practice (quod fit etiam nunc ab Epicureis)." From all I can learn 1 should say that no man of his day was more widely and deeply beloved ; and what renders this attachment more remarkable is that the subject of it appears to have been entirely deficient in the sprightliness and humor which season social intercourse, and which constituted so prominent a characteristic of his countrymen. A man of unusual gravity ; Cicero says of him : " Homo non aptissimus ad jocandum, minimeque resipiens patriam." His temperate habits did not secure him the exemption wdiich might have been expected from some of the worst forms of bodily disease, arpay- fyovpla KOI BvaevrepLKa irdOi], which he bore wdtli unshrinking fortitude, and in the midst of wdiich lie died, foreseeing his end, aware that the day of his greatest suffering was his last. He called it EPICURUS. 17 a blessed and joyful day ; and in that spirit wrote to Idomeneus ^ a letter which Laertius has pre- served to us : " On this happy and closing day of my life I write to thee this : ' While suffering with strangury and dysenter/ pains incapable of in- crease, I am compensated in all this by the joy I have in the memory of our former discussions.' " Seneca alludes to this heroic confession in an argument with a friend on the goods of life. " I will give you," he says, " Epicurus his classi- fication of goods, — very similar to this of mine. There are some things which he would prefer for his allotment, such as ease of body, free from all annoyance, and the calm of a mind rejoicing in the contemplation of its goods. There are others which though lie would rather they should not befall him, he nevertheless praises and ap- proves ; such as the experience of ill health and very severe pains. And this was the case with Epicurus on that last and most blessed day of his life ; for he says that he was suffering tortures of the bladder and of ulcerated bowels which admitted of no increase, but that nevertheless it was for him a blessed day." We cannot, I think, deny the praise, if not of high heroism, at least of an equanimity more germane to the Stoic than 1 Cicero says to Herniachus ; but I follow the authority of Diogenes Laertius. 18 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. the Epicurean doctrine in such an ending. Here was a man about to lapse, as he supposed, into endless nothing ; for a future existence was some- thing undreamed of in his phih)Sophy. The atoms which for seventy-two years in joint-stock com- pany had carried on a certain life-business called Epicurus, were about to dissolve partnership, break lip their establishment, not one of them ever again in eternal time, as he believed, to resume that business and renew that life. What, in view of this impending wreck, is his resource and conso- lation ? — the man who held that pleasure is the supreme good, according to whose theory every- thing else was dross ? If he had n't that, he had nothing ; his doctrine had failed in the final test. But the fangs of mortal disease were clutching at his heartstrings — pains that admitted of no increase. How manage the pursuit of pleasure in such straits ? What pleasure for a man with- out a future, hemmed in between bodily anguish and death ? Future there is none ; the present is torment ; but the past remains. He recalls discussions with Idomeneus in years gone by. The joy of that remem]>rance compensates all. Was ever philosopher so put to it for support in extremis f " Oh, who can hokl a fire in his hand By tliinking on the frosty Caucasus ? " EPICURUS. 19 Plutarch pours contempt on the story. " A man may better see the resemblance of his own face in a troubled deep or a storm, than a smooth and smiling remembrance of past plea- sure in a body tortured with such lancing and rending pains." He died at the age of seventy-two, in the second year of the 127th Olympiad (270 b. c.) His very minute testament, preserved by Laertius, is char- acteristic, and exhibits at once his kindly dispo- sition and his self-conceit. He gave their freedom to several of his slaves. The bulk of his property he bequeathed to two of his confidants, Timo- krates and Amynomachus, who were to come under bonds to provide for the maintenance and education of the sons of his friend and disciple, Metrodorus, until their majority, and also to furnish a dower for his daughter. To another friend, then living, he bequeathed a life-interest in the " garden," and appointed him his succes- sor, as head of the school, with the provision that every future successor while in office should have the usufruct of the garden, which should thus continue to be the headquarters of the sect. He moreover directed that a portion of the in- terest of his property should be devoted to the annual celebration of his birthday, and to cover the expense of a feast on the twentieth of each 20 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. month, in honor of him and his friend Metrodo- rus. This proposition Cicero severely criticises, partly on the ground of vanity and inconsistency with the teachings of one who professed to hold that nothing pertains to us after death, and partly on the ground that a philosopher, and especially a physicist, ought to know that the idea of an annual birthday is all nonsense. The same day, he says, can occur but once, nor indeed its like- ness, unless, after the lapse of many thousand years, all the heavenly bodies shall come to have precisely the same position. " Quid verene ? Po- test esse dies ssepius, qui semel fuit? Certe non potest. An ejusdem modi ? ne id quidem, nisi, cum multa annorum intercesserint millia, ut om- nium siderum, eodem, unde profecta sint, fiat ad unum tempus reversio. Nullus est igitur cujus- quam dies natalis." Democritus, Epicurus' great oracle, would not, he thinks, have acted thus. It was not the part of one who had traversed in his mind " innumerabiles mundos, infinitasque regi- ones, quarum nulla esset ora, nulla extremitas." It was not until after his death that the fame of Epicurus attained the expansion which Plu- tarch charges him with secretly coveting, in spite of his \d6e jSicoo-a^. " The truth is," says Plu- tarch, ^' Epicurus himself allows there are some pleasures derived from fame. And, indeed, why EPICURUS. 21 should he not, when he himself had such a fu- rious lechery and wriggling after glory as made him not only disown his masters, and scuffle about syllables and accents with his fellow-pedant, De- mocritus, whose grammar-rules he stole verbatim, and tell his disciples that there never was a wise man in the world besides himself, but also to put it in writing how Colotes rendered homage to him, as he was one day philosophizing, by touch- ing his knees." Whatever of justice or injustice there may be in this accusation, it would seem that Epicurus anticipated the postumous glory which awaited him, when he wrote to Idome- neus, who aspired to political distinction : " If you are smitten with the love of glory, my letters will make you more famous than these objects which you adore, and for whose sake you are adored." So Shakspeare's sonnet promises his friend, — " And thou in this ehalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent." Famous he became. His followers bore his im- age engraved on cups and rings ; his native city erected statues to his memory. The school flour- ished, the sect increased ; it prevailed in Greece, it found followers in Rome. St. Paul, three cen- turies later, encountered its disciples at Athens; 22 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. and Seneca, contemporary with Paul, writes to his friend Lucilius : — " Glory is the shadow of virtue ; it will accompany even those who desire it not. But as shadows sometimes precede and sometimes follow, so our renown is sometimes before us, and offers itself to cur sight ; and sometimes it is turned from us ; but the later it is, the greater it is, when envy has died away. . . . Look at Epicurus, whom not only the learned, but the ignorant multitude, admire. This man was unknown in the very city of Athens where he hid. Survivor of Metrodorus by many years, in a letter in which he celebrates their mutual friendship with grate- ful remembrance, he adds at last that, possessed of such goods, it was no injury to Metrodorus and himself that the nobles of Greece not only ignored, but scarcely knew them by report. . . . Metrodorus also confesses in one of his letters that he and Epicurus had not tiie distinction they deserved ; but afterward adds, that a great name was in store for them with those who were willing to follow in their steps. I^o virtue can remain concealed ; or if con- cealed, it is not virtue's loss (nulla latet virtus, et latuisse non ipsius est damnum)." It is not very likely that new discoveries will throw new light on the man whose personality has proved such a power in the world, whose charac- teristic idea yet lives, and has representatives still, although the school and the confession are long since extinct. We have all the materials we are likely to have for forming our judgment of his character and life. What shall the verdict be ? 1 EPICURUS. 23 cannot accept that of Plutarch concerning the man, though Plutarch rightly judged the doctrine. I incline to that of Cicero in the Tusculan Ques- tions : ^ " Venit Epicurus, homo minime malus vel potius vir optimus." An austere gravity, a kind of Quaker simplicity, I judge to have been his type. In his letters, instead of the customary salutation, %at/3e ! hail ! he is said to have sub- stituted an admonition to act well, — Ev Trpdrreiv ; and we are told that in his treatise on Rhetoric he named but one excellence, that of plainness. A simple, grav^e, and kindly man; a man who meant well and who lived well, if that garden theory of his be allowed. But when we ask what fruits of enduring worth that garden yielded to continuous culture of three hundred years, — what venerable name, to be ranked with the heroes of the Porch, with the Catos and Antonines, the Epicurean school has produced, — the answer is a blank. A blank in history is the school of Epicurus, though not altogether a blank in let- ters. One poem at least, of prime renown, it has given to the world, the consummate exponent of its doctrine. The poem of Lucretius, " De Rerum Natura," is ranked by the critics among the fore- most — by some, indeed, as the very foremost — in Roman literature. Ovid predicted for it a fame 1 Lib. ii. c. 19. 24 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM, coeval with the earth's duration. We are safe in pronouncing it the first of didactic poems. It is one of the very few of that class which have won for themselves an enduring fame. Pope's " Essay on Man " is the nearest approach to it in that kind. And this is the only fruit that has reached us from that Epicurean garden, the only product that remains of a school which in point of popularity occupied the foremost place among the philosophic systems of antiquity and filled the classic world with its fame. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EPICURUS. In my characterization of Epicurus I spoke of the poverty of his intellectual culture, and noticed the want in him both of the intuitive and the analytic faculty. For speculative inquiry, for dis- coveries in the realm of thought, he had no apti- tude ; but for practical philosophy a very decided, inborn vocation. Philosophy for him was a rule of life — ivep'yeta rov evBatfioua /3lov nrepLTroLovcra. He sought in it precisely what Socrates had taught men to seek in it, — practical well-being. Espe- cially he sought in it freedom, — the freedom which Athens, deprived of her autonomy, and tend- ing to political downfall, no longer enjoyed. He sought emancipation from the yoke of superstition. JTf. EPICURUS. .^^^^^ 25 Lucretius, as we have seen, celebrates this motive in one of his sublimest strains. But though the philosophy of Epicurus is mainly practical, he did speculate ; he was given to system-making ; he had his theory of knowledge and his theory of the universe, as well as his theory and rule of life. And so his philosophy, as Diogenes Laertius tells us, divides itself into three systems, the Kavco- vL/cov, which we may translate psychology, the cj^vcTtKoi/, and the tjOckop^ — Psychology, Physic, and Ethic. The Psychology need occupy us but a very few moments ; it is crude, even for that period. The prime source of all knowledge in the view of Epi- curus is sensible experience. The objects with- out us throw off certain images ; these are received by the senses and communicated to the mind. The senses are infallible : but they have no mem- ory ; they can deal only with what is immediately present. An internal faculty operates on the im- ages which sensuous perception has lodged in the mind. Then the sensations — that is, pleasure and pain — advise us of what is conducive or detri- mental to our well-being. Hence three criteria of truth, — perception, ataOrjo-c^;, conception, irpo- X7]yjn