THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 141 



occupation of any kind. Nature pursues her course 

 in accordance with everlasting laws, the gods never 

 interfering. They haunt 



The lucid interspace of world and world 

 Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind, 

 Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 

 Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, 

 Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 

 Their sacred everlasting calm.* 



Lange considers the relation of Epicurus to the 

 gods subjective; the indication, probably, of an ethical 

 requirement of his own nature. We cannot read his- 

 tory with open eyes, or study human nature to its 

 depths, and fail to discern such a requirement. Man 

 never has been, and he never will be, satisfied with the 

 operations and products of the Understanding alone; 

 hence physical science cannot cover all the demands of 

 his nature. But the history of the efforts made to 

 satisfy these demands might be broadly described as a 

 history of errors the error, in great part, consisting 

 in ascribing fixity to which it is fluent, which varies 

 as we vary, being gross when we are gross, and becom- 

 ing, as our capacities widen, more abstract and sublime. 

 On one great point the mind of Epicurus was at peace. 

 He neither sought nor expected, here or hereafter, any 

 personal profit from his relation to the gods. And it is 

 assuredly a fact, that loftiness and serenity of thought 

 may be promoted by conceptions which involve no idea 

 of profit of this kind. ' Did I not believe/ said a great 

 man f to me once, * that an Intelligence is at the heart 

 of things, my life on earth would be intolerable.' The 

 utterer of these words is not, in my opinion, rendered 

 less but more noble by the fact, that it was the need of 



* Tennyson's ' Lucretius.' f Carlyle. 



