——- 
ADDRESS, lxix 
and immortal beings, whose blessedness excluded every thought of care or 
occupation of any kind. Nature pursues her course in accordance with ever- 
lasting 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 indi- 
cation probably of an ethical requirement of his own nature. We cannot 
read history 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 de- 
scribed as a history of errors—the error in great part consisting in ascribing 
fixity to that which is fluent, which varies as we vary, being gross when we are 
gross, and becoming, as our capacities widen, more abstract andsublime. 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 pro- 
moted by conceptions which involve no idea of profit of this kind. ‘Did I 
not believe,” said a great man 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 noble but more noble, by the fact 
that it was the need of ethical harmony here, and not the thought of personal 
_ profit hereafter, that prompted his observation. 
There are persons, not belonging to the highest intellectual zone, nor yet 
to the lowest, to whom perfect clearness of exposition suggests want of depth. 
They find comfort and edification in an abstract and learned phraseology. 
To some such people Epicurus, who spared no pains to rid his style of every 
trace of haze and turbidity, appeared, on this very account, superficial. He 
had, however, a disciple who thought it no unworthy occupation to spend his 
days and nights in the effort to reach the clearness of his master, and to whom 
the Greek philosopher is mainly indebted for the extension and perpetuation of 
his fame. Some two centuries after the death of Epicurus, Lucretius t wrote 
his great poem, “ On the Nature of Things,” in which he, a Roman, 
developed with extraordinary ardour the philosophy of his Greek prede- 
cessor. He wishes to win over his friend Memnius to the school of Epi- 
curus; and although he has no rewards in a future life to offer, although his 
object appears to be a purely negative one, he addresses his friend with the 
heat of an apostle. His object, like that of his great forerunner, is the 
destruction of superstition; and considering that men trembled before every 
natural event as a direct monition from the gods, and that everlasting 
torture was also in prospect, the freedom aimed at by Lucretius might 
perhaps be deemed a positive good. ‘This terror,” he says, ‘‘and dark- 
ness of mind must be dispelled, not by the rays of the sun and glittering 
shafts of day, but by the aspect and the law of nature.’ He refutes the 
notion that any thing can come out of nothing, or that that which is 
once begotten can be recalled to nothing. The first beginnings, the 
* Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius.’ + Born 99 z.c, 
