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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is this calm monotony of day after day at which the world of the winter resort deliberately aims, a life like that of the deities of Epicurus, untouched by the cares or interests of the world without. The very gaiety is of the same subdued and quiet order drives, donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type.
Descartes attempted what Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and their followers thought to be impossible. He made the fall of terrestrial bodies depend upon the action of a vortex of very subtle matter circulating around the earth.
He had no theory of definition, or division, or ratiocination, or refutation, or explication; on all these matters Epicurus was, as Cicero said, 'naked and unarmed. Like most self-taught or ill-taught teachers, Epicurus trusted to his dogmas; he knew nothing and cared nothing for logical defence. In his Physics Epicurus did little more than reproduce the doctrine of Democritus.
Epicurus relates, that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance?"
'With every language you learn, he had said, 'you will gain a nation. But there were many peoples in her father's kingdom, and when she was Queen they must all love her. True, she began with the tongue of the conquerors, not the conquered. So it happened that we first learned Lucretius, who reproduces in verse the doctrines of Epicurus.
He was instructed in philosophy by Theophrastus, but his own opinions inclined him to that of Epicurus, and he boasted in an epigram, "that if Themistocles freed his country from slavery, Epicurus freed it from irrationality."
Now my mind and my experience rebel against holding to this view, yet I believe with Epicurus, and with you, that the eternal laws of Nature bow to neither divine nor human will." "And yet," said Hermon, "you expect me to trouble myself about those who are as powerless as myself!"
His followers were called Stoics, from their fashion of teaching in the porticos or porches, which in Greek were named stoai. Their great opponents were the Epicureans, or followers of a philosopher by name Epicurus, who held that as man’s life is short, and as he knew not whence he came, nor whither he went, he had better make himself as happy as possible, and care for nothing else.
The Peripatetics, after him, put pleasure down to a lower level, as derivative and accidental; the Stoics went farther in the same direction possibly from antithesis against the growing school of Epicurus.
XXXIII. You see, I imagine, how Epicurus has divided his kinds of desires, not very acutely perhaps, but yet usefully: saying that they are "partly natural and necessary; partly natural, but not necessary; partly neither. That those which are necessary may be supplied almost for nothing; for that the things which nature requires are easily obtained."
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