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Updated: May 1, 2025
VIII. After this, Velleius, with the confidence peculiar to his sect, dreading nothing so much as to seem to doubt of anything, began as if he had just then descended from the council of the Gods, and Epicurus's intervals of worlds. For with what eyes of the mind was your Plato able to see that workhouse of such stupendous toil, in which he makes the world to be modelled and built by God?
For, sir, all men have not the command of that happy ease and tranquillity which Epicurus's philosophy procured him; for many great incumbrances seize almost upon every one every day, or at least some disquiets; and it is not safe to trust the body with any of these, when it is in such a condition and disturbance, presently after the fury and heat of the embrace is over.
It deserves therefore our consideration, whether we shall put young men into Epicurus's boat, wherein, having their ears stopped with wax, as those of the men of Ithaca were, they shall be obliged to sail by and not so much as touch at poetry, or rather keep a guard on them, so as to oblige their judgments by principles of right reason to use it aright, and preserve them from being seduced to their hurt by that which affords them so much delight.
Was there no evil in what afflicted Alcibiades thus? What strange things does Lycon say? who, making light of grief, says that it arises from trifles, from things that affect our fortune or bodies, not from the evils of the mind. What, then? did not the grief of Alcibiades proceed from the defects and evils of the mind? I have already said enough of Epicurus's consolation.
Let us suppose the same with the Venus of Cos, which is not a body, but the representation of a body; nor is the red, which is drawn there and mixed with the white, real blood, but a certain resemblance of blood; so in Epicurus's Deity there is no real substance, but the resemblance of substance.
That is, it is applied to what excites feelings and has attributes, but not to feelings and attributes themselves; and if we called extension, virtue, &c., beings, we should be accused of believing in the Platonic self-existing ideas, or Epicurus's sensible forms in short, of deeming attributes substances. To fill this gap, the abstract, entity, was made into a concrete, equivalent to being.
Men who laboured for the state as jurists or senators, who were grave and studious, generally, if not always, adopted the tenets of Zeno; if they were orators, they naturally turned rather to the Academy, which offered that balancing of opinions so congenial to the tone of mind of an advocate. Among public men of the highest character, very few espoused Epicurus's doctrines.
Epicurus's great confidant and familiar, Colotes, set forth a book with this title to it, that according to the tenets of the other philosophers it is impossible to live. Now what occurred to me then to say against him, in the defence of those philosophers, hath been already put into writing by me.
Porphyry, Ἀφορμαί, 28. She becomes Helen in the beautiful myth of the Simonian Gnostics a Helen who has forgotten her name and race, and is a slave in a brothel in Tyre. Simon discovers her, gradually brings back her memory and redeems her. Irenaeus, i. 23, 2. Plut., Vit. Pomp. 24. See Epicurus's Second Letter, especially Usener, pp. 36-47 = Diog. La. x. 86-104.
Nay, they all, both he and she philosophers, beg and entreat Pythocles, for dear Epicurus's sake, not to affect or make such account of the sciences called liberal. And when they cry up and defend one Apelles, they write of him that he kept himself clean by refraining himself all along from the mathematics.
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