Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/494

Rh 474 EPICUKUS go, but so also must the state, as a specially-privileged and eternal order of things, as anything more than a contriv ance serving certain purposes of general utility. To the Epicureans the elaborate logic of the Stoics was a superfluity. In place of logic we find canonic, the theory of the tests of truth and reality. The only ultimate canon of reality is sensation and feeling ; whatever we feel, whatever we perceive by any sense, that we know on the most certain evidence we can have to be real, and in proportion as our feeling is clear, distinct, and vivid, in that proportion are we sure of the reality of its object. The truth of anything is measured by its vivid and effective presence in consciousness. But in what that vividness (evdpytia) consists is a question which Epicurus does not raise, and which he would no doubt have deemed super fluous quibbling over a matter sufficiently settled by com mon sense. Besides our sensations, we learn truth and reality by our preconceptions or ideas (TrpoAr^eis). These are the fainter images produced by repeated sensations, the &quot; ideas &quot; resulting from previous &quot; impressions &quot;- sensations at second-hand as it were, which are stored up in memory, and which a general name serves to recall. These bear witness to reality, not because we feel anything now, but because we felt it once ; they are sensations registered in language, and again, if need be, trans latable into immediate sensations or groups of sensation. Lastly, reality is vouched for by the imaginative appre hensions of the mind (&amp;lt;ai/Ta&amp;lt;rriKat e7ri/?oXai), immediate feelings of which the mind is conscious as produced by some action of its own. This last canon, however, was of dubious validity. Epicureanism generally stopped by affirm ing that whatever we effectively feel in consciousness is real ; in which sense they allow reality to the fancies of the insane, the dreams of a sleeper, and those feelings by which we imagine the existence of beings of perfect blessedness and endless life. And similarly, just because fear, hope, and remembrance add to the intensity of con sciousness, can the Epicurean hold that bodily pain and pleasure is a less durable and important thing than pain and pleasure of mind. Whatever we feel to affect us does affect us, and is therefore real. Error can only arise be cause we mix up our opinions and suppositions with what we actually feel. The Epicurean canonic is a rejection of logic ; it sticks fast to the one point that &quot; sensation is sensation,&quot; and there is no more to be made of it. Sensa tion, it says, is unreasoning (aXoyos); it must be accepted, and not criticised. Reasoning can only come in to put sensations together, and to point out how they severally contribute to human welfare; it does not make them, and cannot alter them. In the Epicurean physics we have two parts, a general metaphysic and psychology, and a special explanation of particular phenomena of nature. It is in this department that we find exemplified the method of the founder. That method consists in argument by analogy : we apply the process which we have learned in some familiar instance to explain and rationalize for our own satisfaction some obscure and distent process which we do not understand. It is an attempt to make the phenomena of nature intelli gible to us by regarding them as instances on a grand scale of what we are already familiar with on a small. This is what Epicurus calls explaining what we do not see by what we do see. It supposes us to know and compre hend what we are familiar with, and assumes that to explain is to substitute a process with which we are at home for one which we cannot penetrate, but which, with out contradicting any of the phenomena, may be conceived to take place in a similar way. In physics Epicurus founded upon Democritus, and his chief object was to abolish the dualism between mind and matter which is so essential a point in the systems of Plato and Aristotle. All that exists, says Epicurus, is corporeal (TO -nav ecm o-w/xa) ; the intangible is non-existent, or empty space. If a thing exists it must be felt, and to be felt it must exert resistance. But all things are not intangible which our senses are not subtle enough to detect. We must indeed accept our feelings; but we must also believe much which is not directly testified by sensa tion, if only it does not contravene our sensations and serves to explain phenomena. The fundamental postulates of Epicureanism are atoms and the void. We must believe, according to him, that space is infinite, and that there is an illimitable multitude of indestructible, indivisible, and absolutely compact atoms in perpetual motion in this il limitable space. These atoms, differing only in size, figure, and weight, are perpetually moving with equal velocities, but at a rate far surpassing our conceptions ; as they move, they are for ever giving rise to new worlds; and these worlds are perpetually tending towards dissolution, and towards a fresh series of creations. This universe of ours is only one section out of the innumerable worlds in in finite space ; other worlds may present systems very different from the arrangement of sun, moon, and stars, which we see in this. The soul of man is only a finer species of body, spread throughout the whole aggregation which we term his bodily frame. Like a warm breath, it pervades the human structure and works with it; nor could it act as it does in perception unless it were corporeal. The various processes of sense, notably vision, are explained on the principles of materialism. From the surfaces of all objects there are continually flowing thin filmy images exactly copying the solid body whence they originate; and these images by direct impact on the organism produce (we need not care to ask how) the phenomena of vision. Epicurus in this way explains vision by substituting for the apparent action of a body at a distance a direct contact of image and organ. But without following the explana tion into the details in which it revels, it may be enough to say that the whole hypothesis is but an attempt to exclude the occult conception of action at a distance, and substitute a familiar phenomenon. This tendential character of the Epicurean physics becomes more palpable when we look at his mode of rendering particular phenomena intelligible. His purpose is to eliminate all ideas by which the grander phenomena of nature are popularly attributed to Divine interference. That there are gods Epicurus never dreams of denying ; the feelings of human nature are too vivid which present to our mind s eye beings of perfect blessedness and unbroken tranquillity But these gods have not on their shoulders the burden of upholding and governing the world. They are themselves the products of the order of nature, a higher species than humanity, but not the rulers of man, neither the makers nor the upholders of the world. Man should worship them, but his worship is the reverence due to the ideals of perfect blessedness ; it ought not to be inspired either by hope or by fear. To prevent all reference of the more potent phenomena of nature to divine action Epicurus rationalizes the processes of the cosmos. He imagines all possible plans or hypotheses, not actually contradicted by our experience of familiar events, which will represent in an intelligible way the processes of astronomy and meteorology. When two or more modes of accounting for a phenomena are equally admissible as not directly contradicted by known pheno mena, it seems to Epicurus almost a return to the old mythological habit of mind when a savant asserts that the real cause is one and only one. Thus, after several hypothetical accounts of how thunder may be brought about, he adds, &quot; Thunder may be explained in many