Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/53

 most physical" of all the philosophers, began his book on Nature with the words "All things were in confusion together; then came Intelligence, and gave them order and arrangement;" thus laying the foundation of his Natural Philosophy in a principle which could not fail of early application to the sphere of Conduct. The denial of blind Chance, or of immutable Fate, in the realm of physical phenomena easily leads to its repudiation in the sphere of Ethics, and to a recognition of the personal responsibility of the individual mind for the consequences of its own decisions. It was probably a conviction of the ethical fruitfulness of the principle thus laid down by Anaxagoras in the sphere of Physics which induced Aristotle, the greatest of all ethical philosophers, to assert that its author, as compared with his predecessors, was a sober thinker by the side of random babblers. The physical investigations of Democritus were utilized by the Epicureans to free man from superstitious fears of another world, in order that he might direct all his powers to making the best of this world, in a moral, infinitely more than in a physical, sense. He specifically discussed Virtue, and concluded that happiness consisted in Temperance and Self-Control. In a book which he wrote under the significant title of "Tritogeneia," or "Minerva," he