[Footnote 812: ][ (return) ] Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 237-250.
Epicurus is at great pains to prove that the soul is material; and it can not be denied that he marshals his arguments with great skill. Modern materialism may have added additional illustrations, but it has contributed no new lines of proof. The weapons are borrowed from the old arsenal, and they are not wielded with any greater skill than they were by Epicurus himself, I. The soul and the body act and react upon each other; and mutual reaction can only take place between substances of similar nature. "Such effects can only be produced by touch, and touch can not take place without body." [813] 2. The mind is produced together with the body, it grows up along with it, and waxes old at the same time with it. [814] 3. The mind is diseased along with the body, "it loses its faculties by material causes, as intoxication, or by severe blows; and is sometimes, by a heavy lethargy, borne down into a deep eternal sleep." [815] 4. The mind, like the body, is healed by medicines, which proves that it exists only as a mortal substance. [816] 5. The mind does not always, and at the same time, continue entire and unimpaired, some faculties decay before the others, "the substance of the soul is therefore divided." On all these grounds the soul must be deemed mortal; it is dissolved along with the body, and has no conscious existence after death.
[Footnote 813: ][ (return) ] Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things," bk. iii. l. 138-168.
[Footnote 814: ][ (return) ]: Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 444-460.
[Footnote 815: ][ (return) ] Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 438-490.
[Footnote 816: ][ (return) ] Id., ib., bk. iii. l. 500-520.
Such being the nature of the soul, inasmuch as it is material, all its knowledge must be derived from sensation. The famous doctrine of perception, as taught by Epicurus, is grounded upon this pre-supposition that the soul is corporeal. "The ειδωλα ἀπόῤῥοιαι--imagines, simulacra rerum, etc., are, like pellicles, continually flying off from objects; and these material 'likenesses,' diffusing themselves everywhere in the air, are propelled to the perceptive organs." These images of things coming in contact with the senses produce sensation (αἴσθησις). A sensation may be considered either as regards its object, or as regards him who experiences it. As regards him who experiences it, it is simply a passive affection, an agreeable or disagreeable feeling, passion, or sentiment (τὸ πάθος). But along with sensation there is inseparably associated some knowledge of the object which excites sensation; and it is for this reason that Epicurus marked the intimate relation of these two phenomena by giving them analogous names. Because the second phenomenon is joined to the first, he calls it ἐπαίσθησις-- perception. It is sensation viewed especially in regard to its object--representative sensation, or the "sensible idea" of modern philosophy. It is from perception that we draw our general ideas by a kind of prolepsis (πρόληψις) an anticipation or laying hold by reason of that which is implied in sensation. Now all sensations are alike true in so far as they are sensations, and error arises from false reasoning about the testimony of sense. All knowledge is purely relative and contingent, and there is no such thing as necessary and absolute truth.
The system of Epicurus is thus a system of pure materialism, but not a system of materialism drawn, as a logical consequence, from a careful and unprejudiced study of the whole phenomena of mind. His openly avowed design is to deliver men from the fear of death, and rid them of all apprehension of a future retribution. "Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means of resisting them." [817]] To emancipate men from "these terrors of the mind," they must be taught "that the soul is mortal, and dissolves with the body"--that "death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to us." [818] Starting with the fixed determination to prove that
"Death is nothing, and naught after death,"
he will not permit any mental phenomena to suggest to him the idea of an incorporeal spiritual substance. Matter, under any form known to Epicurus, is confessedly insufficient to explain sensation and thought; a "nameless something" must be supposed. But may not "that principle which lies entirely hid, and remains in secret" [819]--and about which even Epicurus does not know any thing--be a spiritual, an immaterial principle? For aught that he knows it may as properly be called "spirit" as matter. May not sensation and cognition be the result of the union of matter and spirit; and if so, may not their mutual affections, their common sympathies, be the necessary conditions of sensation and cognition in the present life? A reciprocal relation between body and mind appears in all mental phenomena. A certain proportion in this relation is called mental health. A deviation from it is termed disease. This proportion is by no means an equilibrium, but the perfect adaptation of the body, without injury to its integrity, to the purposes of the mind. And if this be so, all the arguments of materialism fall to the ground.