onduct should secure for us as
much real pleasure as possible. Now at first sight this looks like
what it was opprobriously called by its enemies, "the philosophy of
the pig-sty." It by no means meant this to its founder. For what is
"pleasure"? Not by any means necessarily the gratification of the
moment, physical or otherwise. A present pleasure may mean future
pain, either of body or of mind. Wrong actions and bestial enjoyments
bring their own penalty. You must choose wisely, and so direct your
life that you suffer least and enjoy most consistently. Temperance and
wisdom are therefore virtues necessary to a true Epicurean. You desire
health; therefore you will live, as Epicurus lived, on simple and
wholesome food. You desire tranquillity or peace of mind; therefore
you will abstain from all perverse acts and gratifications, desires
and emotions, which disturb that peace. In short the thing to be
sought is nothing else but this grateful composure of mind--a thing
which you cannot have if you are always wanting this or that and
either abusing or misusing your bodily or mental functions, or
needlessly mortifying yourself. To the plain man this apparently meant
"Take life easily and keep free of worry." Naturally the plain man's
ideas of taking life easily became those of taking pleasures as they
come, indolently accepting the agreeables of life and feeling no call
to make much of its duties. It is all very well for a high-minded
philosopher to avoid a pleasure in order to avoid its pain, and to
realize that a pleasure of the mind is worth more than a pleasure of
the body, but one cannot expect the ordinary pupil--the _homme moyen
sensuel_--to comprehend this attitude with heartiness sufficient to
put it into practice. It followed therefore that the Epicurean tended,
not only to become lazy, but to become vicious, or to make light of
vices. This was not indeed true Epicureanism, and Epicurus is not to
blame for it; it simply shows that Epicureanism, whatever its logical
or other merits, provided no sufficient stimulus to a right life. As
regards theology the position of the school was that there might very
well be such things as higher beings--there was nothing in physical
philosophy to make them any more impossible than a man or a fish--but
that, if they existed, they were not concerned with man's affairs; his
moral conduct, like his sacrifices and prayers, was not matter for
their consideration. No need, therefore, to