William Wallace

“ But experience had in the time of Epicurus shown the temporary and artificial character of the civic form of social life. It was necessary, therefore, for Epicurus to go back to nature to find a more enduring and a wider foundation for ethical doctrine, to go back from words to realities, to give up reasonings and get at feelings, to test conceptions and arguments by a final reference to the only touchstone of truth—to sensation. There, and there only, one seems to find a common and a satisfactory ground, supposing always that all men’s feelings give the same answer. ”

“ Preoccupied with his own ideas, he chafed under the indifference of thinkers who had grown blasé in speculation and fancied himself persecuted by a conspiracy of professors of philosophy. It is not so easy to demonstrate the connexion between a man's life and doctrine. But it is at least plain that in the case of any philosopher, what makes him such is the faculty he has, more than other men, to get a clear idea of what he himself is and does. More than others he leads a second life in the spirit or intellect alongside of his life in the flesh - the life of knowledge beside the life of will. ”

“ Knowledge or intellect, therefore, is only the surrogate of that more intimate unity of feeling or will which is the underlying reality - the principle of all existence, the essence of all manifestations, inorganic and organic. ”

“ It is thus that Fechner in his "day-view" of things sees in plants and planets the same fundamental "soul" as in us - that is, "one simple being which appears to none but itself, in us as elsewhere wherever it occurs self-luminous, dark for every other eye, at the least connecting sensations in itself, upon which, as the grade of soul mounts higher and higher, there is constructed the consciousness of higher and still higher relations." ”

“ And the perfection of reason is attained when man has transcended those limits of individuation in which his knowledge at first presents him to himself, when by art he has risen from single objects to universal types, and by suffering and sacrifice has penetrated to that innermost sanctuary where the euthanasia of consciousness is reached - the blessedness of eternal repose. ”

“ But, besides removing the psychological slag which clung to Kant's ideas from their matrix and presenting reason as the active principle in the formation of a universe, his successors carried out with far more detail, and far more enthusiasm and historical scope, his principle that in reason lay the a priori or the anticipation of the world, moral and physical. Not content with the barren assertion that the understanding makes nature, and that we can construct science only on the hypothesis that there is reason in the world, they proceeded to show how the thing was actually done. ”

“ We may, if we like, call this element, which is assumed as the basis of all scientific method, irrational - will instead of reason, feeling rather than knowledge.
It is under the banner of this protest against rationalizing idealism that Schopenhauer advances. But what marks out his armament is its pronounced realism. He fights with the weapons of physical doctrine and on the basis of the material earth. He knows no reason but the human, no intelligence save what is exhibited by the animals. ”

“ The Gods.—This aspect of the Epicurean physics becomes clearer when we look at his mode of rendering particular phenomena intelligible. His purpose is to eliminate the common idea of divine interference. That there are gods Epicurus never dreams of denying. But these gods have not on their shoulders the burden of upholding and governing the world. They are themselves the products of the order of nature—a higher species than humanity, but not the rulers of man, neither the makers nor the upholders of the world. ”

“ The Stoic doctrine of Fatalism seemed to Epicurus no less deadly a foe of man’s true welfare than popular superstition. Even in the movement of the atoms he introduces a sudden change of direction, which is supposed to render their aggregation easier, and to break the even law of destiny. So, in the sphere of human action, Epicurus would allow of no absolutely controlling necessity. In fact, it is only when we assume for man this independence of the gods and of fatality that the Epicurean theory of life becomes possible. ”

“ Epicureanism generally was content to affirm that whatever we effectively feel in consciousness is real; in which sense they allow reality to the fancies of the insane, the dreams of a sleeper, and those feelings by which we imagine the existence of beings of perfect blessedness and endless life. Similarly, just because fear, hope and remembrance add to the intensity of consciousness, the Epicurean can hold that bodily pain and pleasure is a less durable and important thing than pain and pleasure of mind. Whatever we feel to affect us does affect us, and is therefore real. ”

“ Yet in the loneliness of life at Berlin the idea of a wife as the comfort of gathering age sometimes rose before his mind - only to be driven away by cautious hesitations as to the capacity of his means, and by the shrinking from the loss of familiar liberties. ”

“ It is, in fact, says Epicurus—in language which contrasts strongly with that of Aristotle on the same topic—“a more precious power than philosophy.” The reason or intellect is introduced to balance possible pleasures and pains, and to construct a scheme in which pleasures are the materials of a happy life. Feeling, which Epicurus declared to be the means of determining what is good, is subordinated to a reason which adjudicates between competing pleasures with the view of securing tranquillity of mind and body. “We cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and righteously.” ”

“ It is unnecessary to multiply instances to prove that idealism was never without a protest that there is a heart of existence, life, will, action, which is presupposed by all knowledge and is not itself amenable to explanation. ”

“ The only ultimate canon of reality is sensation; whatever we feel, whatever we perceive by any sense, that we know on the most certain evidence we can have to be real, and in proportion as our feeling is clear, distinct and vivid, in that proportion are we sure of the reality of its object. But in what that vividness (ἐνάργεια) consists is a question which Epicurus does not raise, and which he would no doubt have deemed superfluous quibbling over a matter sufficiently settled by common sense. (2) Besides our sensations, we learn truth and reality by our preconceptions or ideas (προλήψεις) . ”

“ Intellect, in short, is only the consequence of insufficient response between stimulus and action. Where action is entirely automatic, feeling does not exist. It is when the excitation is partial only, when it does not inevitably and immediately appear as action, that we have the appearance of intellect in the gap. The chief and fundamental difference between Schopenhauer and Spencer lies in the refusal of the latter to give this "adjustment" or "automatic action" the name of will. ”

“ Philosophy.—The Epicurean philosophy is traditionally divided into the three branches of logic, physics and ethics. It is, however, only as a basis of facts and principles for his theory of life that logical and physical inquiries find a place at all. Epicurus himself had not apparently shared in any large or liberal culture, and his influence was certainly thrown on the side of those who depreciated purely scientific pursuits as one-sided and misleading. ”

“ All that exists, says Epicurus, is corporeal (τὸ πᾶν ἐστι σῶμα) ; the intangible is non-existent, or empty space. If a thing exists it must be felt, and to be felt it must exert resistance. But not all things are intangible which our senses are not subtle enough to detect. We must indeed accept our feelings; but we must also believe much which is not directly testified by sensation, if only it serves to explain phenomena and does not contravene our sensations. The fundamental postulates of Epicureanism are atoms and the void (ἄτομα καὶ κενόν) . ”

“ When two or more modes of accounting for a phenomena are equally admissible as not directly contradicted by known phenomena, it seems to Epicurus almost a return to the old mythological habit of mind when a savant asserts that the real cause is one and only one. ”

“ If it is daringly realistic, it is no less audacious in its idealism. The second aspect of his influence is the doctrine of redemption of the soul from its sensual bonds, first by the medium of art and second by the path of renunciation and ascetic life. It may be difficult in each case to draw the line between social duty and individual perfection. But Schopenhauer reminds us that the welfare of society is a temporal and subordinate aim, never to be allowed to dwarf the full realization of our ideal being. Man's duty is undoubtedly to join in the common service of sentient beings ”

“ But this limitation, say the successors of Kant, rests upon a misconception. The sense of inadequacy is only a condition of growing knowledge in a being subject to the laws of space and time; and the very feeling is a proof of its implicit removal. Look at reason not in its single temporal manifestations but in its eternal operation, and then this universal thought, which may be called God, as the sense-conditioned reason is called man, becomes the very breath and structure ”

“ Anterior to Kant the gradual advance of Philosophy from Kant to Schopenhaueridealism had been the most conspicuous feature in philosophic speculation. That the direct objects of knowledge, the realities of experience, were after all only our ideas or from perceptions was the lesson of every thinker from Descartes to Hume. And this doctrine was generally understood to mean that human thought, limited as it was by its own weakness and acquired habits, could hardly hope to cope successfully with the problem of apprehending the real things. ”

“ Reasoning can come in only to put sensations together, and to point out how they severally contribute to human welfare; it does not make them, and cannot alter them.
Physics.—In the Epicurean physics there are two parts—a general metaphysic and psychology, and a special explanation of particular phenomena of nature. The method of Epicurus is the argument of analogy. It is an attempt to make the phenomena of nature intelligible to us by regarding them as instances on a grand scale of that with which we are already familiar on a small scale. ”

“ Error can arise only because we mix up our opinions and suppositions with what we actually feel. The Epicurean canon is a rejection of logic; it sticks fast to the one point that “sensation is sensation,” and there is no more to be made of it. ”

“ In other words, the forms of knowledge were the main factor in making objects. By Kant, however, these forms are generally treated psychologically as the action of the several faculties of a mind. Behind thinking there is the thinker. But in his successors, from Fichte to Hegel, this axiom of the plain man is set aside as antiquated. Thought or conception without a subjectagent appears as the principle - thought or thinking in its universality without any individual substrata in which it is embodied: τὸ νοείν or νόησις is is to be substituted for νούς. ”

“ For his absolute individualism, which recognizes in the state, the church, the family only so many superficial and incidental provisions of human craft, the means of relief was absorption in the intellectual and purely ideal aims which prepare the way for the cessation of temporal individuality altogether. But theory is one thing and practice another; and he will often lay most stress on the theory who is most conscious of defects in the practice. ”

“ Thus in the true idea of things there is no irreducible residuum of matter: mind is the Alpha and Omega, at once the initial postulate and the final truth of reality.
In various ways a reaction arose against this absorption of everything in reason. In Fichte himself the source of being is primeval activity, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action (That Handlung) of the absolute ego. The innermost character of that ego is an infinitude in act and effort. "The will is the living principle of reason," he says again. ”

“ In this aversion to a purely or mainly intellectual training may be traced a recoil from the systematic metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, whose tendency was to subordinate the practical man to the philosopher. Ethics had been based upon logic and metaphysics. But experience showed that systematic knowledge of truth is not synonymous with right action. Hence, in the second place, Plato and Aristotle had assumed a perfect state with laws to guide the individual aright. ”

“ This universe of ours is only one section out of the innumerable worlds in infinite space; other worlds may present systems very different from that of our own. The soul of man is only a finer species of body, spread throughout the whole aggregation which we term his bodily frame. ”