PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM.

"Philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment; but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life."— Callicles, in Plato's Gorgias.

PHILOSOPHIC ATHEISM.1

INTRODUCTION.

BY philosophic atheism I mean speculative

denial of a supermundane, conscious intel

ligence, theories of the universe which regard it as the product of blind force, or as a selfsubsisting, self-governing, independent being. Of these theories, however repugnant to practical reason and religious faith, we are not authorized to say with Milton,

"Of such doctrine never was there school

But the heart of the fool,

And no man therein doctor but himself." 2

Justice compels us to admit the claim of some who have reasoned thus, to be counted philosophers, lovers of wisdom, seekers of truth.

1 Not to be confounded with the scientific atheism of the Positivists.

2 Samson Agonistes, 297-299.

The moment we begin to speculate about the universe, there arises the question of origin. Philosophy, even atheistic philosophy, cannot stop short of the "primordia rerum; it wants to know "unde Natura creet res, auctet alatque." The arch-atheist of antiquity could not rest in a given phenomenal world, but pushed his inquiry, says his great commentator, "extra flammantia monia mundi." The question Whence? is found to be involved in the questions What? and How? And here it is that philosophic atheists differ among themselves almost as widely as they differ from theists. I select as illustrations two prominent examples, an ancient and a modern, representing two opposite types,- Epicurus and Schopenhauer.

1 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, i. 73, 74.