the doctrine or system of philosophy maintained by Epicurus and his followers.

His philosophy consisted of three parts, canonical, physical, and ethical. The first was about the canons, or rules of judging. The censure which Tully passes upon him for despising logic, will hold true only with regard to the logic of the stoics, which he could not approve of, as being too full of nicety and quirk. Epicurus was not acquainted with the analytical method of division and argumentation; nor was he so curious in modes and formation as the stoics. Soundness and simplicity of sense, assisted with some natural reflections, was all his art. His search after truth proceeded only by the senses, to the evidence of which he gave so great a certainty, that he considered them as an infallible rule of truth, and termed them the first natural light of mankind.

In the second part of this philosophy he laid down atoms, space, and gravity, as the first principles of all things; he did not deny the existence of God, but thought it beneath his majesty to concern himself with human affairs; he held him a blest immortal being, having no affairs of his own to take care of, and above meddling with those of others.

As to his ethics, he made the supreme good of man to consist in pleasure and consequently supreme evil in pain. Nature itself, says he, teaches us this truth, and prompts us from our birth to procure whatever gives us pleasure, and avoid what gives us pain. To this end he proposes a remedy against the sharpness of pain: this was to divert the mind from it, by turning our whole attention upon the pleasures we have formerly enjoyed: he held that the wife man must be happy, as long as he is wise; that pain, not depriving him of his wisdom, cannot deprive him of his happiness.

There is nothing that has a fairer show of honesty than the moral doctrine of Epicurus. Gassendus pretends, that the pleasure in which this philosopher has fixed the sovereign good, was nothing else but the highest tranquillity of mind in conjunction with the most perfect health of body; but Tully, Horace, and Plutarch, as well as almost all the fathers of the church, give us a very different representation: indeed the nature of this pleasure, in which the chief happiness is supposed to be seated, is a grand problem in the morals of Epicurus. Hence there were two kinds of Epicureans, the rigid and the remiss: the first were those who understood Epicurus's notion of pleasure in the best sense, and placed all their happiness in the pure pleasures of the mind, resulting from the practice of virtue: the loose or remiss Epicureans, taking the words of that philosopher in a gross sense, placed all their happiness in bodily pleasures or debauchery.