e as regulative of conduct, and
maintained that our senses were our only guides in both; in a word, they
denied that God had implanted in man an absolute rational and moral
principle, and maintained that he had no other clue to the goal of his
being but his experience in life, while the distinction of right and
wrong was only a distinction of what was found conducive to happiness and
what was not; they had no faith in or fear of a divine Being above man
any more than of a divine principle within man, and they scorned the idea
of another world with its awards, and concerned themselves only with
this, which, however, in their hands was no longer a cosmos but a chaos,
out of which the quickening and ordinative spirit had fled.

EPICURUS, a Greek philosopher, born at Samos, of Athenian origin;
settled at Athens in his thirty-sixth year, and founded a philosophical
school there, where he taught a philosophy in opposition to that of the
Stoics; philosophy he defined as "an activity which realises a happy life
through ideas and arguments," summing itself up "in ethics, which are to
teach us how to attain a life of felicity"; his system comprised "the
three branches included in philosophy, viz., logic, physics, and ethics,"
but he arranges them in reverse order, logic and physics being regarded
only as the handmaids of ethics; for he "limited logic to the
investigation of the criterion of truth," and physics he valued as
disillusioning the mind of "the superstitious fear that went to disturb
happiness"; he was a man of a temperate and blameless life, and it is a
foul calumny on him to charge him with summing up happiness as mere
self-indulgence, though it is true he regarded "virtue as having no value
in itself, but only in so far as it offered us something--an agreeable
life."

EPICYCLE, an expression used in the PTOLEMAIC (q. v.)
system of astronomy; the old belief that the celestial bodies moved in
perfect circles round the earth was found to be inadequate to explain the
varying position of the planets, a difficulty which led Ptolemy to invent
his theory of epicycles, which was to the effect that each planet
revolved round a centre of its own, greater or less, but that all these
centres themselves moved in procession round the earth, a theory which
fell to pieces before the investigations of Kepler and Newton.

EPIDAURUS, a town of ancient Greece, in Argolis, on the eastern
shore of the Peloponnesus; was at one time