26 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. brain through the senses, calls them up at pleasure, arranges, compares, and draws conclusions from them. Our perceptions are always correct, because they are an efflux from the things themselves. Our opinions are only so far correct as they agree with the testimony of the senses; where they contradict or differ from this they are false. But whence arises this disagreement, and its consequent error? Epicurus' solution of this question is peculiar. Perception, he says, is a motion from without; opinion, being the result of internal contemplation of the images thrown in upon the mind, is a motion from within. If the motion from within is continuous with the motion from without, like the co-ordinates of an hyperbola, then the opinion is. correct; but if it disconnects or traverses the motion from without, it is false. Thus all knowledge, all truth, is referred at last to material phenomena. All ideas not derivable from these he regards as illusions. He allows no laws of thought, no regulative faculty inherent in the mind. Sensible experience not only supplies the material of thought, but determines all correct thinking; and sensible experience is a lawless aggregation of insulated phenomena. The science of geometry not being founded on sensible experience, or not solely on that, he repudiated as not sufficiently evident. Here is something that marks to the study of the absolute; the New investigated the phenomenal world.1 vacuo, Epicurus, then, adopted the atomic theory of Democritus. Starting with the axiom that nothing can produce nothing (οὐδὲν γίνεται ἐκ τοῦ μὴ ÖVTOS), he held that the worlds were formed from atoms which must have had an eternal existence. In the beginning these atoms existed only in - atoms of various forms and dimensions. From the confluence, collision, and concretion of these atoms were formed the bodies that compose our world and all the worlds that are, which he supposes to be infinite. The universe is constituted of infinitesimal atoms; it will one day dissolve into atoms again. But the atoms are eternal; they will remain, and form new worlds; and so on in endless succession. But how happened the atoms to flow together while yet they existed as separate indivisible units? Here we come upon the main point of difference between Epicurus and his original. Democritus had endowed his atoms with an aboriginal motion; he started them with an impact, wλýyn.2 Epicurus thought this unphilosophical. But how did he 1 Eleatic, from Elea, a town in Lower Italy colonized by the Greeks. Not that all the philosophers so named resided there, but because it was the residence of some of the more distinguished among them; e. g. Xenophanes and Parmenides. 2 Cicero, De Fato, 20. 30 PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM. direction they assumed, they chose to go a little askew. Crude as this notion is, it shadows forth a very important truth; namely this, that human action (which Epicurus would refer to the particles that compose our organism) is partly the product of inevitable circumstance, and partly of free-will, human life the diagonal resultant of these two forces. I have found nothing in Diogenes Laertius respecting this declination of the atoms; my authority is Cicero. In the treatise "De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum," cast in the form of a colloquy between L. Torquatus, C. Triarius, and Cicero, Torquatus, the advocate of Epicurus, asks why Cicero, who does not, like most of his opponents, hate the man, cannot accept the philosopher, whom I, he says, "quem ego arbitror unum vidisse verum, maximisque erroribus, hominum animos liberavisse, et omnia tradidisse quæ pertinent ad bene beateque vivendum." He thinks it must be because Epicurus wrote in so plain. a style; he had not Plato's, and Aristotle's, and Theophrastus' ornate diction. "For I can scarcely believe that you will not allow the truth of his doctrine. You are mistaken, says Cicero. His style offends me not, he writes intelligibly, and that is all I ask of a philosopher, although I despise not eloquence if he has it to give. It is his matter with |