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countenance so opprobrious an opinion, but various passages that distinctly controvert it,passages in which he peremptorily denies the existence of CHANCE OF FORTUNE, either as a deity or a cause of action; and unequivocally refers the whole of those complex series of percussions and repercussions, interchanges and combinations, exhibited by the elementary seeds or atoms of matter during the creative process, to a chain of immutable laws which they received from the Almighty Architect at the beginning, and which they still punctually obey, and will for ever obey till the universe shall at length cease to exist.* Whom," says Epicurus, in a letter to his disciple Menæceus, that has yet survived the preying tooth of time, and will be found in Diogenes Laertius, "do you believe to be more excellent than he who piously reveres the Gods, who feels no dread of death, and rightly estimates the design of nature? Such a man does not, with the multitude, regard CHANCE as a God, for he knows that God can never act at random; nor as A CONTINGENT CAUSE OF EVENTS; nor does he conceive, that from any such power flows the good or the evil that measures the real happiness of human life." He held, however, that the laws which govern the universe were altogether arranged and imposed upon it by the Creator at its first formation, and that the successive train

* For a more extensive inquiry into this subject, the reader is referred to the author's Prolegomena to his translation of "The Nature of Things," from which this summary is drawn

of events to which they have given rise have followed as the necessary result of such an arrangement, and not as the immediate superin, tendence of a perpetually controlling Providence. For it was the opinion of Epicurus, as well as of Aristotle, that perfect rest and tranquillity are essential to the perfect happiness even of Him, who, to adopt his own language in another place, possesses all immortality and beatitude. "Think not," says he, "that the different motions and revolutions of the heavens, the rising, setting, eclipses, and other phænomena of the planets, are produced by the immediate control, superintendence, or ministration of Him who possesses all immortality and beatitude; it is from the immutable laws which they received at the beginning, in the creation of the universe, that they punctually fulfil their several circuits.'

The origin of this calumny upon the character of Epicurus it is by no means difficult to trace, and it has been sufficiently traced, and sufficiently exposed, by Diogenes Laertius, Gassendi, Du Rondelle, and other distinguished writers, who have done ample justice to his memory; and upon the confessions of Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca, abundantly proved, that it was the same rancorous spirit of envy among many of his competitors for public fame, and especially among the Stoic philosophers, which strove to fix upon him the charge of voluptuous living, though the most temperate and abstemious Athenian of his day, that thus, with yet keener malevolence, endea

voured to brand him with the still fouler reproach of the grossest impiety and atheism. It is indeed scarcely to be believed, if the fact were not concurrently attested by all the writers of antiquity, that the philosopher, whose name, from the low and malignant spirit I have just adverted to, has been proverbialised for general licentiousness and excess, drew the whole of his daily diet from the plainest pottage, intermixed with the herbs and fruits of his pleasant and celebrated garden. "I am perfectly contented," says he, in an epistle to another friend, "with bread and water alone; but send me a piece of your Cyprian cheese, that I may indulge myself whenever I feel disposed for a luxurious treat." Such, too, was the diet of his disciples. Water, says Diocles, was their common beverage; and of wine they never allowed themselves more than a very small cup. And hence, when the city of Athens was besieged by Demetrius, and its inhabitants reduced to the utmost extremity, the scholars of Epicurus bore up under the calamity with less inconvenience than any other class of citizens; the philosopher supporting them at his own expence, and sharing with them daily a small ration of his beans. The pleasure of friendship, the pleasure of virtue, the pleasure of tranquillity, the pleasure of science, the pleasure of gardening, the pleasure of studying the works of nature, and of admiring her in all the picturesque beauty of her evolutions, formed the sole pursuit of his life. This alone, he affirmed,

deserves the name of PLEASURE, and can alone raise the mind above the grovelling and misnamed pleasures of self-indulgence, debauchery, and excess.

There is something gratifying to an enlarged and liberal spirit in being thus able to rescue from popular, but unfounded obloquy, a sage of transcendant genius and almost unrivalled intellect, and in restoring him to the admiration of the virtuous and the excellent. That he did not feel the force of any argument offered by nature in proof of the immortality of the soul, and was in this respect considerably below the standard of Socrates and Cicero, must be equally admitted and lamented; and should teach us the high value of that full and satisfactory light which was then so much wanted, and has since been so gloriously shed upon this momentous subject. But let it at the same time be remembered, that, with a far bolder front than either of the philosophers here adverted to, he dared to expose the grossness and the absurdities of the popular religion of his day, and in his life and his doctrines gave a perpetual rebuke to vice and immorality of every kind. And hence, indeed, the main ground of the popular calumny with which his character was attacked, and which has too generally accompanied his memory to the present day.

LECTURE IV.

ON THE PROPERTIES OF MATTER, ESSENTIAL AND PECULIAR.

In our last lecture I endeavoured to render it probable, that all visible or sensible matter is the result of a combination of various solid, impenetrable, and exquisitely fine particles or units of the same substance, too minute to be detected by any operation of the senses. Of the shape or magnitude of these particles we know nothing and even their solidity and impenetrability, as I then observed, is rather an assumption, for the purpose of avoiding several striking difficulties and absurdities that follow from a denial of these qualities, than an ascertained and established fact.

From this unsatisfactory view of it in its elementary and impalpable state, let us now proceed to contemplate it in its manifest and combined forms, and to investigate the more obvious properties they offer, and the general laws by which they are regulated.

The change of distance between one material body and another, or, in other words, their approach to or separation from each other, is called MOTION; and the wide expanse in which