rculaneum, constitute all
that has survived the general wreck.

[Footnote 764: Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. x.
ch. xvi., xvii.]

We are thus left to depend mainly on his disciples and successors for
any general account of his system. And of the earliest and most
immediate of these the writings have perished.[765] Our sole original
authority is Diogenes Laertius, who was unquestionably an Epicurean. The
sketch of Epicurus which is given in his "Lives" is evidently a "labor
of love." Among all the systems of ancient philosophy described by him,
there is none of whose general character he has given so skillful and so
elaborate an analysis. And even as regards the particulars of the
system, nothing could be more complete than Laertius's account of his
physical speculations. Additional light is also furnished by the
philosophic poem of Lucretius "On the Nature of Things," which was
written to advocate the physical theory of Epicurus. These are the chief
sources of our information.

[Footnote 765: Some fragments of the writings of Metrodorus, Phaedrus,
Polystratus, and Philodemus, have been found among the Herculanean
Papyri, and published in Europe, which are said to throw some additional
light on the doctrines of Epicurus. See article on "Herculanean Papyri,"
in Edinburgh Review, October, 1862.]

It is said of Epicurus that he loved to hearken to the stories of the
indifference and apathy of Pyrrhon, and that, in these qualities, he
aspired to imitate him. But Epicurus was not, like Pyrrhon, a skeptic;
on the contrary, he was the most imperious dogmatist. No man ever showed
so little respect for the opinions of his predecessors, or so much
confidence in his own. He was fond of boasting that he had made his own
philosophy--_he_ was a "self-taught" man! Now "Epicurus might be
perfectly honest in saying he had read very little, and had worked out
the conclusions in his own mind, but he was a copyist, nevertheless; few
men more entirely so."[766] His psychology was certainly borrowed from
the Ionian school. From thence he had derived his fundamental maxim,
that "sensation is the source of all knowledge, and the standard of all
truth." His physics were copied from Democritus. With both, "atoms are
the first principle of all things." And in Ethics he had learned from
Aristotle, that if an absolute good is not the end of a practical life,
_happiness_ must be its end.[767] All that is fundamental in the s