In seeking to understand the phenomena of the heavens, E. has no scientific end in view; his sole object is to enable the mind to account for them to itself, without the necessity of imagining any supernatural agency at work. "The phenomena of the heavens," says E., " admit of various causes being assigned for their production, equally conformable to the facts learned from the senses. If, then, in thinking of any appear ance, we suppose it brought about by the same cause that produces another appearance which gives no alarm or uneasiness, we are as much delivered from uneasiness as if we saw that such is the cause of it." E. did not deny that there are gods, but he strenuously maintained, that as "happy and imperishable beings," they could have nothing to do with the affairs of the universe or of men. " Beware," lie says, "of attributing the revolutions of the heaven, and eclipses, and the rising and setting of stars, either to the original contrivance or continued regulation of such a being. For business, and cares, and anger, and benevolence, are not accordant with happiness, but arise from weak ness, and fear, and dependence on others." E. next proceeds to deal with the fear of death, Having proved in his psyChology that the dissolution of the body involves that of the soul, he argues that the most terri ble of all evils, death, is nothing to us, " since when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not. It is nothing, then, to the dead or the for to the one class it is not near, and the other class are no longer in existence." Whether E. actually succeeded in removing the terrors of death by his syllogism, may be doubted.
The positive part of E.'s system may be noticed in a few words. He held that pleasure was the chief good, and it is from a misapprehension of the meaning of this word as used by E. that the term Epicurean came to signify one who indulged his sensual appetites without stint or measure. At the same time, it is easy to see that the use of the word "pleasure" was calculated to produce the mischievous results with which the later Epicureanism was charged. According to E., the sources and tests of all ethical truth are the feelings (pathe), and these are two, pleasure and pain. We delight in the one,
and avoid the other instinctively. " When we say that pleasure is the end of life, we do not mean the pleasures of the debauches or the sensualist, as some from ignorance or from malignity represent, but freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from anxiety. For it is not continuous driukings and revelings, nor the society of women, nor rare viands, and other luxuries of the table, that constitute a pleasant life, but sober contemplation that searches out the grounds of choice and avoidance, and banishes those chimeras that harass the mind." But, on the other hand, E. says: "If the means to which sensualists owe their pleasures dispelled the anxieties of the mind . . . . and enabled them to set limits to their desires, we should have no grounds to blame them for taking their fill of pleasure, wherever they could find it, provided it were attended with no pain or grief from any quarter; for that is the only evil." The whole question of ethics, then, comes to a calculation and balancing of pleasures and pains; in other words, the cardinal virtue is prudence. E. rests justice on the same prudential basis as temperance. Denying any abstract and eternal right and wrong, he affirms that injustice is an evil, because it exposes the individual to disquietude from other men; justice is a virtue, because it secures him from this disquietude. " Injustice is not an evil in itself, but becomes so from the fear that haunts the injurer of not being able to escape the appointed avengers of such acts." The duties of friendship and good-fellowship are inculcated on the same grounds of security to the individual.
Among the Romans, the system of E. was adopted by many distinguished men. Horace, Atticus, and Pliny the younger were Epicureans; and the splendid poem of Lucretius must have recommended the system to many. In modern times, Epicureanism was reuscitated in France by Pierre Gassendi, who published an account of E.'s life and a defense of his lative professed his principles; among others, Moliere, Saint Evremond, count de Grammont, the duke of Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, Fontenelle, and Voltaire.