EPICUREANS

Followers of the tenets of Epicurus. a philosopher who lived from b. c. 337 to b. c. 270, and taught during the latter half of his life at Athens. The name of Epicurean has become the general designation of those who, either theoretically or practically, make pleasure the chief end of life and the standard ol all virtue. Ol the genuine doctrines of Epicurus himself we have notices in the work of Diogenes I.aertius, who has preserved to us fragments of his very voluminous writings: but for these remains we should be at a lo , amid the conflicting statements of his friends and enemies, how to judge of his character as a man and a philosopher. The private character of Epicurus has, we ddubtnot, been unjustly aspersed; it will be found, however, on a careful examination of his system, that his merits as a philosopher have been as undeservedly extolled. Epicurus was the first philosophical teacher who deserted the lofty idea of science which Plato and Aristotle had striven to develop. Truth is, with him, no longer an object worth pursuing for its own sake, but only in so far as it contributes to the piece of mind of its po e ors. Hence, though he retains the threefold division of philosophy into ethics, physics, and dialectics (in Epicurean language, canonic), lie a igns the two latter a place subordinate to the first, and bestows on them a cursory and heedle mode of treatment. We should greatly wrong Epicurus if we represented the gratification of the sensual appetites to be the object proposed by him to the wise man. The happine which he regards as the true end of existence is rather a species of quietism, in which the philosopher, protected by his knowledge from all fear of injury from the powers of nature, and by the laws from the a aults of his fellow-creatures, holds himself open to all the pleasurable sensations which the temperate indulgence of his ordinary appetites, the recollection of past enjoyments, and the anticipation of future, are sufficient abundantly to furnish. In order to support his imaginary wise man in this tranquillity, he deemed it nece ary to show that the apprehensions which beset mankind, of death, of the power and anger of the gods, and the like, are wholly unfounded. For this purpose he made use of the physical doctrine of Demo crit us; a system of atomic materialism, which makes all existences to arise from the concourse of minute particles of matter— the soul among Ihe number, which is consequently, at the moment of death, resolved into its constituent elements. The mental philosophy of Epicurus was of a sim- [s. 422]