The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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120 THE STOIC CREED
most consonant with the theory of pleasure as the
summum bonum, which was the ruling feature in Epicurus
s philosophy, and it struck at the root of religious
superstition by excluding the gods from arbitrary and
capricious interference with the government of the
world. This was a point of great importance, in face of
the base and debasing religious notions, beliefs, and
practices of the age.
But, next, Epicurus, while adopting
the Atomic
theory generally, made important alterations on it.
For one thing, he denied that atoms falling perpen
dicularly down would ever come into collision, and so
that a cosmos could ever be formed on that sole
assumption. In order to cope with the difficulty,
Democritus had imagined that atoms differed from each
other in their velocity. Some fell more swiftly than
others ;
and so the swifter would overtake the slower,
and thereby collisions would occur.
This appeared to
Epicurus to be an erroneous interpretation of falling
bodies. A famous passage in the second book of
Lucretius (225-239) puts the argument in a vivid form.
No doubt, it is there maintained, difference in velocity
is in point when you are dealing with bodies falling
through air or through water, where you have to take
into account the resisting medium. But this does not
hold in the case of a pure vacuum. "
pure vacuum
can afford no resistance to anything in any place, or at
any time, but must go on allowing a thing what its
own nature demands." Now,
"what its own nature
demands is, according to Epicurus, free movement or
liberty to the atoms to swerve from the vertical, even
to the slightest imaginable extent, to begin with.