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Updated: June 27, 2025
It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make happiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man who has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has most felt life.
The seeking after sensual pleasure and luxury was the most glaring evil of his city as the Talmud says, of ten parts of lust nine were given to Alexandria and with every variety of denunciation he returns again and again to the charge. Epicureanism is detestable not only for its low idea of human life, but for its godless conception of the universe.
In fact, his system seems to have been a crude and ordinary materialism, such as the vulgar are in all ages prone to, and beyond which their minds cannot go. The refined Catulus was also an adherent of epicureanism, though he also attached himself to the Academy.
Indeed we must admit that with the very inadequate psychology of that time no reasonable solution of the then central problem of determinism could be found. But there is no reason for supposing that the poet did not have a complete mastery of what the best teachers of his day had to offer. Vergil's Epicureanism, however, served him chiefly as a working hypothesis for scientific purposes.
In this quarter all culture is loathed which isolates, which sets goals beyond gold and gain, and which requires time: it is customary to dispose of such eccentric tendencies in education as systems of 'Higher Egotism, or of 'Immoral Culture Epicureanism. According to the morality reigning here, the demands are quite different; what is required above all is 'rapid education, so that a money-earning creature may be produced with all speed; there is even a desire to make this education so thorough that a creature may be reared that will be able to earn a great deal of money.
The writings of Epicurus were no longer preserved, and even at the close of the classical age a more or less one-sided conception had been formed of his philosophy. Nevertheless, that phase of Epicureanism which can be studied in Lucretius, and especially in Cicero, is quite sufficient to make men familiar with a godless universe.
The Roman Catholic and Anglican writers appeared to think that the mere husk of morality would be left with the disappearance of Christianity; that a sort of enlightened epicureanism, a prudent animalism, would sway the greater part of mankind; in a word, that we should be "whited sepulchres," fair to look on without, but "inside full of dead men's bones, and all filthiness". The agnostic was no less certain that morality, which had outgrown the cumbrous garments manufactured by theology, would get on equally well in the handy raiment provided by science.
He was almost a philosopher in his epicureanism, striving always that nothing should trouble him. But now he had two great troubles, which he could not throw off from him. In the first place, after having striven against it for the last four or five years with singular success, he had in a moment of weakness allowed himself to become engaged to Guss Mildmay.
The Stoics aspired to the repression of all emotion, and the Epicureans to freedom from all disturbance; yet in the upshot the one has become a synonym of stubborn endurance, the other for unbridled licence. With Epicureanism we have nothing to do now; but it will be worth while to sketch the history and tenets of the Stoic sect.
And thus, though he gradually drifted back into a species of spiritual epicureanism, he always felt grateful for his sojourn in the dark world. He did not abandon his religious profession, but he became more content to suspend his judgment. He saw dimly that the mistake he had made was in hoping for anything of the nature of certainty.
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