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Updated: May 13, 2025
"While I numbered myself among the Epicureans, whose doctrine still possesses the greatest charm for me, I nevertheless shared the master's opinion that it is insulting the gods to suppose that they will disturb their blissful repose for the sake of us insignificant mortals.
Then this must be my first lesson from you how one can decide out of hand which is the best and the true philosophy to be taken, and the others left. Her. I will tell you: I observed that it attracted most disciples, and thence inferred that it was superior. Ly. Give me figures; how many more of them than of Epicureans, Platonists, Peripatetics? Of course you took a sort of show of hands. Her.
Certainly Peripatetics, Epicureans, Platonists, followers of Diogenes, Antisthenes, Pythagoras, and more yet. Ly. Quite so; numbers of them. Now, are their doctrines the same, or different? Her. Entirely different. Ly. But the truth, I presume, is bound to be in one of them, and not in all, as they differ? Her. Certainly. Ly.
This is the objection fairly laid down in its full latitude; I desire the reader's serious and continued attention to the answers I am going to make to it. SECT. LXXV. Answers to the Objection of the Epicureans drawn from the Eternal Motion of Atoms.
Does it not amount to that, when your school reckon goodness the only end, and the Epicureans pleasure? or again when you say everything is material, and Plato recognizes an immaterial element also in all that exists?
The declaration of the Tulpehocken Church, when it applied for reception, is given in full in Halle Records, new edition, pp. 139-141, and shows the conditions on which congregations were received, because the paper had been prepared for that purpose and exhibits "the steadfast adherence of the united ministers to the confession and doctrine of the unaltered Augsburg confession, which had here been attacked by false brethren, by fanatical sects, by epicureans and by divers others, in which assaults they had not only themselves continued steadfast, but had held firm the Evangelical Lutheran Church members, and had gathered them and increased their number, be it said to the glory of God, who had stood by them."
It was on this point that they separated from the more refined Epicureans, who were often willing to sublimate to the highest degree the kind of pleasure they proposed as an object, provided only it were admitted that pleasure is necessarily the ultimate end of our actions. But this the Stoics firmly denied. "Pleasure," they argued, "is the companion, not the guide, of our course."
Even in the consideration of moral questions Cicero is pursued by the conflict of opinions, although in this department he is most at home. The points he is most anxious to establish are the doctrines of God and the soul. These are most fully treated in his essay "De Natura Deorum," in which he submits the doctrines of the Epicureans and the Stoics to the objections of the Academy.
But I was always told when young that the writing of it had led him to commit suicide a deed on his part which seems to have been painted in black colors, though Cato and Brutus, the Stoics, did the same thing very gloriously. The Epicureans are held to be sensualists, because they have used the word "pleasure" instead of "happiness," and Cicero is hard upon them.
"True," he added, "your Demeter is by no means a powerful helper in time of need. She is a goddess such as Epicurus imagines the immortals. Without interfering with human destiny, she stands above it in sublime grandeur and typical dignity. You belong, if I see correctly, to the Epicureans?" "No," replied Hermon. "Like my lord and King, I, too, number myself among the pupils of the wise Straton."
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