His outlook on life must have been very gloomy, if we are to trust certain quotations from Greek and Latin authors. To matters of mythology, descriptions of battles, and grandiose comparisons in Homer, Jefferson apparently paid no attention. He saw in the old poet a repository of ancient wisdom and the ancient philosophy of life. From him he collected verses in which he found expressed views on human destiny,—a courageous, stoic, yet disenchanted philosophy, summed up in two lines from Pope's translation:
To labour is the lot of man below
And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.
When he read from Cicero's "Tusculanae" he selected passages with a view to confirm the deistic and materialistic principles towards which he was leaning at the time: "All must die; if only there should be an end to misery in death. What is there agreeable in life, when we must reflect that, at some time or other we must die." This particular piece of reasoning seems to have struck Jefferson quite forcibly, for he repeated it again and again fifty years later in his letters to John Adams: "For if either the heart, or the blood, or the brains, is the soul, then certainly the soul, being corporeal, must perish with the rest of the body; if it is air, it will perhaps be dissolved; if it is fire, it will be extinguished."[16]
It was then that he copied and evidently accepted the statement of Bolingbroke that "it is not true that Christ revealed an entire body of ethics, proved to be the law of nature."
The "law of nature"—what was meant by the word? Was it the Epicurean maxim of Horace,—"enjoy to-day and put as little trust as possible in the morrow?" If such had been the conclusion reached by Jefferson he could have followed the line of least resistance and enjoyed the good things of life, the good wines of the Raleigh Tavern, the pretty girls and all the social dissipations of many of his contemporaries. Such would have been Jefferson's destiny, had he been born in the Old World. Had he been made of weaker stuff he would have become one of the fox-hunters, horse-racers and card-players of the Virginian gentry. But he was saved by his aristocratic pride and the stern teaching of the old Stoics.
He was conscious that he was of good stock, and he had read in Euripides that "to be of the noble born gives a peculiar distinction clearly marked among men, and the noble name increases in lustre in those who are worthy."[17]
To be ever upright and to be worthy of one's good blood, this was the simplest, most obvious and most imperious duty. It would have been very difficult for Jefferson to believe any longer that "at the end of the journey we shall deliver up our trust into the hands of him who gave it and receive such reward as to him shall seem proportionate to our merit", which was his belief in 1763. There was not even much to obtain in our life as a reward, for most societies are so organized that "whenever a man is noble and zealous, he wins no higher prize than baser men."[18] Still the fact remained that, after the collapse of all the religious superstructure, the foundations of morality were left unshaken, so Jefferson undertook to rebuild his own philosophy of life according to Bolingbroke's advice, with the material at hand. For it was evident that "a system thus collected from the writings of ancient heathen moralists, of Tully and Seneca, of Epictetus, and others, would be more full, more entire, more coherent, and more clearly deduced from unquestionable principles of knowledge."[19]
But he would take nobody's word for it, he would accept the teachings of no professor of moral philosophy; every man had to think for himself and to formulate once for all his own philosophy. When writing to his nephew, who he thought might go through the same crisis, Jefferson declared some forty years later that:
Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much part of his nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality and not the TO KALON, truth, etc. as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience is as much a part of man, as his leg or arm.
But this is the Jefferson of 1808, the mature man, almost the aged sage of Monticello. How far he was from having reached that poise and that clear vision of the moral world, appears in the confusion and contradictions of the abstracts collected in the "Literary Bible." Yet when he read Homer, Euripides, Cicero, Shakespeare, and even Buchanan, Jefferson had a clear and single purpose. He was reading more for profit than for pleasure, to gather material with which to build anew, by himself and for himself, a moral shelter in which he could find refuge for the rest of his days. He was not thinking then of devoting his life to his country; if he had any patriotism, it was dormant, and if he had any sense of abstract justice it is nowhere manifest. And yet, quite in contrast with the general run of quotations in the "Literary Bible" are some maxims scribbled in one of his unpublished Memorandum books under the year 1770. He had already levelled the top of the hill on which he was to build Monticello and was digging the cellar. But one day, after noting carefully that "4 good fellows, a lad and two girls, of about 16 each, have dug in my cellar a place in 8 hrs. ½, 3 feet deep, 8 feet wide and 16½ feet long," he stopped to recapitulate the most striking maxims by which he intended to regulate his life: