THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



Epicurus himself declared that he who would well 

 enough consider his precepts would " never be disturbed 

 by either sleeping or waking fancies/' but might "live 

 like a god among men." 



In our skeptical age, we dare not hope for so easy 

 a road nor so sure a goal. Yet in this same skeptical 

 age, wonders have been achieved. Space and time 

 have been rendered in a sense subject to man's will 

 through the service of steam and electricity; plagues 

 and famines have been all but banished from the earth ; 

 preventive medicine grapples with disease as never 

 before, while surgery robs physical injuries of many 

 of their former terrors; and in the moral field, en- 

 lightened sentiment assures a larger measure of justice 

 between man and man and between nation and nation 

 a nearer approach to the ideal of moral equality 

 than was ever known in any previous generation. 



The advance of scientific knowledge has thus raised 

 the average level of human happiness higher and higher. 

 It remains for each individual to apply the rules of 

 right living that are within his reach. By so doing, 

 each may attain a large measure of that freedom of 

 body and spirit, that mingling of self-reliance and com- 

 munal helpfulness, which the old Greek characterized 

 as godlike, and which we of a generation that knows 

 not the attributes of the gods, may perhaps most fitly 

 describe as Ideally Human. 



[18] 



