The evils of life, for the cure of which Lucretius considers his philosophy available, appeared to him to spring not out of man's relation to Nature, but out of the weakness of his reason and the corruption of his heart. The great service of Epicurus consisted not only in revealing the laws of Nature, but in laying his finger on the secret cause of man's unhappiness. Observing the insufficiency of all external goods to bestow peace and contentment, he saw that the evil lay in the vessel into which these blessings were poured:—
Intellegit ibi vitium vas efficere ipsum
Omniaque illius vitio corrumpier intus,
Quae conlata foris et commoda cumque venirent;
Partim quod fluxum pertusumque esse videbat,
Ut nulla posset ratione explerier umquam;
Partim quod taetro quasi conspurcare sapore
Omnia cernebat, quaecumque receperat, intus[4].
The evils which vitiate our happiness are the cowardice which dares not accept the blessings of life, the weakness which repines at what is inevitable, the restless desires which cannot enjoy the present and crave for what is beyond their reach, the apathy and insensibility to natural enjoyment, which are the necessary consequence of luxurious indulgence. Thus the aim of his moral teaching was to purify the heart from superstition, from the fear of death, from the passions of ambition and of love, from all artificial pleasures and desires.
The greatest of these evils and the mainspring of all human misery is superstition. It is this which surrounds life with the gloom of death—