The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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CHAPTER VI
THE EPICUREAN CONTRAST
"Now, as Science demands the radical extirpation of caprice
and the absolute reliance upon law in nature, there grew with the
growth of scientific notions a desire and determination to sweep
from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to place
natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with themselves."
TYNDALL.
It should never be forgotten that the natural philosophy of
Epicurus is the foundation of his ethics ;
its raison d etre is, that
it renders possible a theory of conduct." W. WALLACE.
LIKE Stoicism, Epicureanism is
I
distinctively an ethical
system but it is ethics ; reposing on physics, and so
implicates psychology and theory of knowledge. Like
Stoicism, too, it finds the germ of both its physics and
its ethics in earlier Greek systems ;
the physics being
derived from Democritus and the Atomic philosophers,
and the ethics from Aristippus and the Cyrenaic school. 1
Epicurus (341-270 B.C.),
like the founders of Greek
schools generally, was a voluminous writer produc
ing "three hundred scrolls," it is said, written, as
Diogenes Laertius boasts (x. 17),
without any cita-
1
A book of Theodorus, the Cyrenaic, On the Gods,
is said
especially to have influenced Epicurus. See Diogenes Laertius,
ii. 12.
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