may be content with few. "For I am
convinced," Epicurus continues, "that they have the greatest enjoyment
of wealth, who are least dependent upon it for enjoyment."

Thus if Epicurus did not absolutely teach simplicity of living, he
taught his disciples the necessity of being capable of such simplicity,
which they could {225} hardly be without practice. So that in reality
the doctrine of Epicurus came very near that of his opponents. As
Seneca the Stoic observed, "Pleasure with him comes to be something
very thin and pale. In fact that law which we declare for virtue, the
same law he lays down for pleasure."

One of the chief and highest pleasures of life Epicurus found in the
possession of friends, who provided for each other not only help and
protection, but a lifelong joy. For the 'larger friendship' of the
civic community, Epicurus seems to have had only a very neutral regard.
Justice, he says, is a convention of interests, with a view of neither
hurting or being hurt. The wise man will have nothing to do with
politics, if he can help it.

In spite of much that may offend in the doctrines of Epicurus, there is
much at least in the man which is sympathetic and attractive. What one
observes, however, when we compare such a philosophy with that of Plato
or Aristotle, is first, a total loss of constructive imagination. The
parts of the 'philosophy,' if we are so to call it, of Epicurus hang
badly together, and neither the Canonics nor the Physics show any real
faculty of serious thinking at all. The Ethics has a wider scope and a
more real relation to experience if not to reason. But it can never
satisfy the deeper apprehension of mankind.

The truest and most permanently valid revelations {226} of life come
not to the many but to the one or the few, who communicate the truth to
the many, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, always at the cost
of antagonism and ridicule. A philosophy therefore which only
represents in theoretical form the average practice of the average man,
comes into the world still-born. It has nothing to say; its hearers
know it all, and the exact value of it all, already. And in their
heart of hearts, many even of those who have stooped to a lower ideal,
and sold their birthright of hopes beyond the passing hour, for a mess
of pottage in the form of material success and easy enjoyment, have a
lurking contempt for the preachers of what they practise; as many a
slaveholder in A