Moral Science by Alexander Bain (top 20 books to read txt) 📖

at once against cruel tyranny and against all the gravest misfortunes. Next, the fear of the gods was not less delusive, and hardly less tormenting, than the fear of death. It was a capital error (Epicurus declared) to suppose that the gods employed themselves as agents in working or superintending the march of the Cosmos; or in conferring favour on some men, and administering chastisement to others. The vulgar religious tales, which represented them in this character, were untrue and insulting as regards the gods themselves, and pregnant with perversion and misery as regards the hopes and fears of mankind. Epicurus believed sincerely in the gods; reverenced them as beings at once perfectly happy, immortal, and unchangeable; and took delight in the public religious festivals and ceremonies. But it was inconsistent with these attributes, and repulsive to his feelings of reverence, to conceive them as agents. The idea of agency is derived from human experience; we, as agents, act with a view to supply some want, to fulfil some obligation, to acquire some pleasure, to accomplish some object desired but not yet attained--in short, to fill up one or other of the many gaps in our imperfect happiness; the gods already _have_ all that agents strive to get, and more than agents ever do get; their condition is one not of agency, but of tranquil, self-sustaining, fruition. Accordingly, Epicurus thought (as Aristotle[14] had thought before him) that the perfect, eternal, and imperturbable well-being and felicity of the gods excluded the supposition of their being agents. He looked upon them as types of that unmolested safety and unalloyed satisfaction which was what he understood by pleasure or happiness--as objects of reverential envy, whose sympathy he was likely to obtain by assimilating his own temper and condition to theirs, as far as human circumstances allowed.

These theological views were placed by Epicurus in the foreground of his ethical philosophy, as the only means of dispelling those fears of the gods that the current fables instilled into every one, and that did so much to destroy human comfort and security. He proclaimed that beings in immortal felicity neither suffered vexation in themselves nor caused vexation to others--neither showed anger nor favour to particular persons. The doctrine that they were the working managers in the affairs of the Cosmos, celestial and terrestrial, human and extra-human, he not only repudiated as incompatible with their attributes, but declared to be impious, considering the disorder, sufferings, and violence, everywhere visible. He disallowed all prophecy, divination, and oracular inspiration, by which the public around him believed that the gods were perpetually communicating special revelations to individuals, and for which Sokrates had felt so peculiarly thankful.[15]

It is remarkable that Stoics and Epicureans, in spite of their marked opposition in dogma or theory, agreed so far in practical results, that both declared these two modes of uneasiness (fear of the gods and fear of death) to be the great torments of human existence, and both strove to remove or counterbalance them.

So far, the teaching of Epicurus appears confined to the separate happiness of each individual, as dependent upon his own prudence, sobriety, and correct views of Nature. But this is not the whole of the Epicurean Ethics. The system also considered each man as in companionship with others; The precepts were shaped accordingly, first as to Justice, next as to Friendship. In both these, the foundation whereon Epicurus built was Reciprocity: not pure sacrifice to others, but partnership with others, beneficial to all. He kept the ideas of self and of others inseparably knit together in one complex association: he did not expel or degrade either, in order to give exclusive ascendancy to the other. The dictate of Natural Justice was that no man should hurt another: each was bound to abstain from doing harm to others; each, on this condition, was entitled to count on security and relief from the fear that others would do harm to him. Such double aspect, or reciprocity, was essential to social companionship: those that could not, or would not, accept this covenant, were unfit for society. If a man does not behave justly towards others, he cannot expect that they will behave justly towards him; to live a life of injustice, and expect that others will not find it out, is idle. The unjust man cannot enjoy a moment of security. Epicurus laid it down explicitly, that just and righteous dealing was the indispensable condition to every one's comfort, and was the best means of attaining it.

The reciprocity of Justice was valid towards all the world; the reciprocity of friendship went much farther; it involved indefinite and active beneficence, but could reach only to a select few. Epicurus insisted emphatically on the value of friendship, as a means of happiness to both the persons so united. He declared that a good friend was another self, and that friends ought to be prepared, in case of need, to die for each other. Yet he declined to recommend an established community of goods among the members of his fraternity, as prevailed in the Pythagorean brotherhood: for such an institution (he said) implied mistrust. He recommended efforts to please and to serve, and a forwardness to give, for the purpose of gaining and benefiting a friend, and he even declared that there was more pleasure in conferring favours than in receiving them; but he was no less strenuous in inculcating an intelligent gratitude on the receiver. No one except a wise man (he said) knew how to return a favour properly.[16]

Virtue and happiness, in the theory of Epicurus, were thus inseparable. A man could not be happy until he had surmounted the fear of death and the fear of gods instilled by the current fables, which disturbed all tranquillity of mind; until he had banished those factitious desires that pushed him into contention for wealth, power, or celebrity; nor unless he behaved with justice to all, and with active devoted friendship towards a few. Such a mental condition, which he thought it was in every man's power to acquire by appropriate teaching and companionship, constituted virtue; and was the sure as well as the only precursor of genuine happiness. A mind thus undisturbed and purified was sufficient to itself. The mere satisfaction of the wants of life, and the conversation of friends, became then felt pleasures; if more could be had without preponderant mischief, so much the better; but Nature, disburthened of her corruptions and prejudices, required no more to be happy. This at least was as much as the conditions of humanity admitted: a tranquil, undisturbed, innocuous, non-competitive fruition, which approached most nearly to the perfect happiness of the Gods.[17]

The Epicurean theory of virtue is the type of all those that make an enlightened self-interest the basis of right and wrong. The four cardinal virtues were explained from the Epicurean point of view. _Prudence_ was the supreme rule of conduct. It was a calculation and balancing of pleasures and pains. Its object was a judicious selection of pleasures to be sought. It teaches men to forego idle wishes, and to despise idle fears. _Temperance_ is the management of sensual pleasures. It seeks to avoid excess, so as on the whole to extract as much pleasure as our bodily organs are capable of affording. _Fortitude_ is a virtue, because it overcomes fear and pain. It consists in facing danger or enduring pain, to avoid greater possible evils. _Justice_ is of artificial origin. It consists in a tacit agreement among mankind to abstain from injuring one another. The security that every man has in his person and property, is the great consideration urging to abstinence from injuring others. But is it not possible to commit injustice with safety? The answer was, 'Injustice is not an evil in itself, but becomes so from the fear that haunts the injurer of not being able to escape the appointed avengers of such acts.'

The Physics of Epicurus were borrowed in the main from the atomic theory of Democritus, but were modified by him in a manner subservient and contributory to his ethical scheme. To that scheme it was essential that those celestial, atmospheric, or terrestrial phenomena that the public around him ascribed to the agency and purposes of the gods, should be understood as being produced by physical causes. An eclipse, an earthquake, a storm, a shipwreck, unusual rain or drought, a good or a bad harvest--and not merely these, but many other occurrences far smaller and more unimportant, as we may see by the eighteenth chapter of the Characters of Theophrastus--were then regarded as visitations of the gods, requiring to be interpreted by recognized prophets, and to be appeased by ceremonial expiations. When once a man became convinced that all these phenomena proceeded from physical agencies, a host of terrors and anxieties would disappear from the mind; and this Epicurus asserted to be the beneficent effect and real recommendation of physical philosophy. He took little or no thought for scientific curiosity as a motive _per se_, which both Democritus and Aristotle put so much in the foreground.

Epicurus adopted the atomistic scheme of Democritus, but with some important variations. He conceived that the atoms all moved with equal velocity in the downward direction of gravity. But it occurred to him that upon this hypothesis there could never occur any collisions or combinations of the atoms--nothing but continued and unchangeable parallel lines. Accordingly, he modified it by saying that the line of descent was not exactly rectilinear, but that each atom deflected a little from the straight line, and each in its own direction and degree; so that it became possible to assume collisions, resiliences, adhesions, combinations, among them, as it had been possible under the variety of original movements ascribed to them by Democritus. The opponents of Epicurus derided this auxiliary hypothesis; they affirmed that he invented the individual deflection of each atom, without assigning any cause, and only because he was perplexed by the mystery of man's _free-will_. But Epicurus was not more open to attack on this ground than other physical philosophers. Most of them (except perhaps the most consistent of the Stoic fatalists) believed that some among the phenomena of the universe occurred in regular and predictable sequence, while others were essentially irregular and unpredictable; each philosopher devised his hypothesis, and recognized some fundamental principle, to explain the first class of phenomena as well as the second. Plato admitted an invincible Erratic necessity; Aristotle introduced Chance and Spontaneity; Democritus multiplied indefinitely the varieties of atomic movements. The hypothetical deflexion alleged by Epicurus was his way, not more unwarranted than the others, of providing a fundamental principle for the unpredictable phenomena of the universe. Among these are the mental (including the volitional) manifestations of men and animals; but there are many others besides; and there is no ground for believing that the mystery of free-will was peculiarly present to his mind. The movements of a man or animal are not exclusively subject to gravitation and other general laws; they are partly governed by mental impulses and by forces of the organism, intrinsic and peculiar to himself, unseen and unfelt by others. For these, in common with many other untraceable phenomena in the material world, Epicurus provides a principle in the supplementary hypothesis of deflexion. He rejected the fatalism contained in the theories of some of the Stoics, and admitted a limited range of empire to chance, or irregularity. But he maintained that the will, far from being among the phenomena essentially irregular, is under the influence of motives; for no man can insist more strenuously than he does (see the Letter to Menoecens) on the complete power of philosophy,--if the student could be made to feel its necessity and desire the attainment of it, so as to meditate and engrain within himself sound views about the gods, death, and human life generally,--to mould our