little, for fear of next morning; eschew politics and love and all violently passionate activities;
do not give hostages to fortune by marrying and having children; in your mental life, teach
yourself to contemplate pleasures rather than pains. Physical pain is certainly a great evil, but if
severe, it is brief, and if prolonged, it can be endured by means of mental discipline and the
habit of thinking of happy things in spite of it. Above all, live so as to avoid fear.
It was through the problem of avoiding fear that Epicurus was led into theoretical philosophy.
He held that two of the greatest sources of fear were religion and the dread of death, which were
connected, since religion encouraged the view that the dead are unhappy. He therefore sought a
metaphysic which would prove that the gods do not interfere in human affairs, and that the soul
perishes with the body. Most modern people think of religion as a consolation, but to Epicurus
it was the opposite. Supernatural interference with the course of nature seemed to him a source
of terror, and immortality fatal to the hope of release from pain. Accordingly he constructed an
elaborate doctrine designed to cure men of the beliefs that inspire fear.
Epicurus was a materialist, but not a determinist. He followed Democritus in believing that the
world consists of atoms and the void; but he did not believe, as Democritus did, that the atoms
are at all times completely controlled by natural laws. The conception of necessity in Greece
was, as we have seen, religious in origin, and perhaps he was right in considering that an attack
on religion would be incomplete if it allowed necessity to survive. His atoms had weight, and
were continually falling; not towards the centre of the earth, but downwards in some absolute
sense. Every now and then, however, an atom, actuated by something like free will, would
swerve slightly from the direct downward path, * and so would come into collision with some
other atom. From this point onwards, the development of vortices, etc. proceeded in much the
same way as in Democritus. The soul is material, and is composed of particles like those of
breath and heat. ( Epicurus thought breath and wind different in substance from air; they were
not merely air in motion.) Soul-atoms are distributed throughout the body. Sensation is due to
thin films
* An analogous view is urged in our day by Eddington, in his interpretation of the principle
of indeterminacy.