By and by he began to teach others. When he was thirty-two he opened a school at Mitylene, where he remained a year. Then he started an academy at Lampsacus, and taught there diligently for four years. Not until 306 B.C., when he was about six-and-thirty, did he buy the famous garden at Athens which was for ever after to be identified with his name.

Many tales are told of the life of the Epicureans in their garden; more or less false, for they have mostly originated from the evil reports circulated by their many enemies, notably the Stoics.

The life in the garden, which doubtless contained. several buildings, temples, baths, lecture-halls, &c., was simplicity itself. The diet of Epicurus and his many pupils, indeed so many flocked to him from all parts that they had to wait for admission,-bore out by its frugality the inscription over the principal entrance:"The keeper of this mansion, where pleasure is the highest good, will provide you with barleycakes and fresh water from the spring."

It would seem that Epicurus indeed was more nervously anxious to avoid the pain of satiety than to cater for himself and his pupils among the pleasures; and so skilful were the plans he laid for the success of his scheme of perpetual content, that it was acknowledged even by his adversaries that however changeable a man might be before he became an Epicurean, he never wished to alter his opinions after he joined the happy company in the garden.

The opinions of that happy company were as bland a food for the mind as that which Epicurus recommended for the body.

He considered that philosophy was not the art of truth, but the art of life. All investigations except those which would inform man how to manage his constitution and surroundings were unprofitable and useless.

Aristippus believed happiness and pleasure to be iden

tical. So did Epicurus, arguing that happiness should be the only aim of man, because it is instinctively pursued by the animals.

Virtue and vice were not to be sought and avoided for their own sake, but because of their connection with pleasure and pain. Experience and reason uniting to prove that vice produces pain and virtue pleasure, virtue was to be cultivated and vice eschewed.

The philosopher ranked the pleasures and pains of the body considerably below those of the mind. Physical pleasure and pain are momentary, soon over and forgotten; but mental joy or suffering are connected with memory, hope and fear, embracing the past and the future as well as the present, and are therefore incomparably greater.

Epicurus divided his philosophy into three parts:— Canonics, which treated of the means by which all knowledge was to be obtained, and of the conditions or criteria of truth, which he considered our sensations, ideas or imagination, and affections to be; Physics, in which he treated of the universe, on which subject his opinions coincided with those of Democritus; and Ethics, in which he expounded his doctrines of vice and virtue and their bearing upon the Epicurean goal-human and earthly happiness.

He seemed to reject the idea of the One Eternal in toto. He accepted gods and goddesses with important reservations. While he granted that there was a race of superior beings somewhere in the universe that was worthy of homage, he denied that the "gods" had anything to do with the weal or woe of humanity.

The direct influence of Socrates shines through the seeming novelties of Epicurus.

Socrates, the greatest and most determined antagonist of all that was vague and wide of the mark, had been the one to bring down philosophy, that was, as it were, calmly floating about in the heavens like a huge balloon, to

earth, which he considered its proper sphere. Epicurus is nothing, if not of the earth, earthy.

Socrates was positive or dogmatic only when Ethics or the science of morality was in question. Epicurus took refuge in morals, seemingly in the forlorn hope that in Ethics there might be cunningly hidden somewhere the key to the great problem, Human Existence.

That the key to any mystery can be found by minds enjoying tranquillity-the state which was the ideal state to be struggled for by the Epicureans, who would doubtless have been horrified had the profane termed it "apathy" -is a question. The prologue to effort is restlessness; and rest belongs to ends, to conclusions-does not lead to anything else.

Therefore, praiseworthy as was the simple well-doing inculcated by Epicurus-whatever may have been its motive-the conclusion drawn from the records of this scheme of thought by Plutarch will be shared by most who investigate its history. Plutarch declared that among the Epicureans there had not been a single great man, nor had they among them produced one great action.

M

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE STOICS.

AFTER a course of "relaxation," as amusements and pastimes are termed, the mind welcomes work-effort on its own part-as the body heated by a hot sun welcomes a plunge into the cool sea.

After long residence among smiling fields, shady woodlands with purling streamlets, and all the soothing sights and sounds of a rural plain-bold rocks, angry seas, inaccessible cliffs-all externals that are strong, powerful, and suggestive of Might, are a relief to the senses.

A pleasing effect is produced in our thoughts when we turn from the dead, pleasant level of Epicureanism to scan the frowning, repellent heights of Stoicism.

To find the well-spring of Stoicism we must glance back first to the melancholy and mankind-hating Heraclitus, then to the Megarics, the followers of the friend and pupil of Socrates, Euclid.

Stilpo, the reformed "man of pleasure," had influenced the actual founder of Stoicism, Zeno, when in early youth he attended his severe, but eloquent, lectures.

Before entering upon the history of the principal Stoics, it will be as well to understand their principal opinions. These were directly in opposition to those of the Epicureans. The Epicureans admitted Virtue as the means to their chief end, Happiness. The Stoics considered Virtue as the target at which their lives were continually to aim. Morality and Science to them were as one.

The Stoics, although no more friendly with the "Peri

patetics," or followers of Aristotle, than any one philosophical sect has been with any other since Thales, agreed with them in declaring that the first principle of human nature is Self-love, or, more mildly speaking, Selfpreservation.

This they consider to be born with the infant. When the infant winks and blinks in a strong light, or screams when it is hungry or uncomfortable, the Stoics do not consider these spasmodic efforts as a natural result of impressions upon the sensitive nervous system of the human young, but as an "appetite" to "remain in the condition in which they are," which is part of themselves.

The first office (officium, a word with a larger sense than the word Duty) of Man is, they hold, to keep himself in the State of Nature.

The question arises, what did they mean by "State of Nature -one savage, one civilised, one free, or one constrained by existing laws and customs?

Study of the various enunciations of the line of celebrated Stoical teachers shows that they recognised two "sorts" of Nature. Nature collectively-in the organised and orderly system of the universe; and Nature individually -the nature of this or that human being, or animal, or fish, or plant, &c.

Some of the Stoics thought that Man in his life ought to imitate the Universal Nature; an imitation which would naturally result in his placing Self, and the suggestions of Self, aside, and considering the general welfare first.

Others considered that Man was to model his conduct according to the nature peculiar to mankind in general; a method which would lead to a lower system of morals than the above.

How Man ought to direct his life, was one of the principal objects of the system.

It remains to glance at their peculiar tenets.

They acknowledged a Deity, a Creator. He had contrived the universe by means of a series of causes, the