its surface an exquisitely subtile image of itself, which impresses its shape upon the human retina. If this image proceed directly from the object to the eye, it is distinct; if any of the particles are stopped by intervening obstacles, it is broken and imperfect; if the distance traversed is so great that the force of the particles is spent, the image is blurred and faint. You see your form reflected in a mirror. That is because the atoms emanating from your body strike the hard surface and rebound into your eye. But why do we see our forms reversed in mirrors? Because the particles are turned inside out by the force of the blow. Very subtile and penetrating these flying molecules were supposed to be. The curtain in the theatre shakes them like warm dust from its crimson folds. Forms of dead people in their graves fling them off, and they make their way through coffin-lid and sod, and flit as ghosts before the sharpened vision of men and women as they pass hurriedly by graveyards; they fly abroad at night, vague and aimless, pass through the closed doors of chambers, perforate the skin, reach the latent senses as they lie passive in slumber, and thus cause the pleasing dream or the hideous nightmare. They become broken perhaps by contact with other images with which the air is filled, and then, as they meet perchance the human senses, the eye is terrified by monstrous shapes of gorgon and chimæra, a man's head on a horse's body, a woman's bust with a fish's extremities, a three-headed pig, or a child with a tail. The air is crowded with these moving spectres. They dance into the poet's dreamy eyes, and his imagination teems with marvellous shapes, grand, grotesque, and beautiful. They throng in such rapid succession upon the vision of the sleeper that the numberless phantoms of his dream seem one phantom, and that a live one, just as the spokes of a spinning-wheel become one blur, or as the whisking of the circular card which children used to play with and wonder at changes the painted figures upon its border into busy wood-sawyers and boys playing at leap-frog. And since every conceivable image is within range of every man's retina at almost every instant of time, it is not surprising that in revery men should be haunted by so many weird shapes, or that people should possess the power they do of calling up whatever shape they will.

It is to this wild infinitude of disorder that, according to Epicurus, the world owes its appearance of order. The numberless chances have resulted in harmony. Not a trace of design does he allow in the universe; not a purpose nor an end in a single existing thing. Only the foolish babble of plans and intentions. Men walked on their legs, said he, because they found it more convenient than walking on all-fours. They looked out of their eyes, finding that they answered the purposes of seeing better than their ears or their noses. But it is fancy that suggests that these organs were constructed for these especial uses and for no other, or that originally they were constructed for any uses whatever. They came so. Idle is all speculation upon causes, efficient or final. Take things as they appear, without trying to account for them, was the word of the great materialist. He was thoroughly indifferent about laws and ends. He looked up at the midnight skies gemmed with stars, he saw the hosts of them in their glory, but he was moved by no curiosity, he was touched with no wonder. "O yes, pretty things enough, to be sure: pity their happy twinkle should be put out every morning. But why vex your brains about such trifles? what business have you with the stars?" You must have an explanation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, must you? One is as good as another. Take the first which offers. Call the moon a dollar or a cheese, and the stars pinheads. You may account for summer and winter easily enough by supposing the sun to be beaten about by opposing currents of wind, one of which drives it away from the earth, leaving it cold, while the other brings it near, making it warm. Are you perplexed by the alternations of day and night? There is no difficulty about the matter if you suppose that the sun, after his daily journey through the skies, becomes faint and goes to bed behind the curtain of the western clouds, or if you reflect that its torch may be lighted up and extinguished every day. But the monthly changes of the moon! Well, what of them? The moon waxes and wanes. So do babies grow fat and lean. So do men swell up with dropsy and pine away with fever. If you think the moon's attacks of plethora and depletion are rather too regular and violent, why not compare it to a snow-ball, and say that it loses some of its bulk by flying so swiftly through

the air, and gains again by the atoms which stick to it as it speeds along?

Mother Earth, thought Epicurus, was an old crone, barren now and exhausted. In her youth she produced men from her teeming womb, laid them upon her soft couch of grass, and gave them milk from her full udders. Now since the memory of man she has given birth to nothing but mosquitos and fleas, and other vermin. The great races are dying out. The violent shocks of wind are wearing down the old globe, which, like all other bodies exposed to the friction of the drifting sand atoms, will in time waste away; then the walls of the vast world, assaulted on every side, will crack and crumble into mouldering ruins.

Of course, among all these dancing, gyrating, fantastic molecules there is no room for a soul. Epicurus meant to leave none. Lucretius, the Epicurean poet, putting into noble verse the unbelief of his master, gives twenty-six arguments to prove that the soul of man perishes with the body. For the soul, he says, is nothing but a vapor diffused throughout the frame, strengthening with its strength and failing with its weakness, sick in its sickness and blithe in its health; so thin and light that you cannot see it vanish when the body dies, nor perceive that its departure lessens by a jot the body's weight. And the spirit of man, which dwells in the hollow of his chest, is only a still more attenuated ether, a cunningly mingled gas, nameless, hidden, evanescent as the perfume of a crushed violet. The student's glowing thought is but the feverish movement of fiery particles in the blood; the stately images that troop through the poet's kindled imagination are but the mimic pageantry of the frisking globules, no more real than castles of cloud in the sun-setting; and all the beautiful sentiments, all the conceptions that we deem imperishable, flush and fade and alter and vanish with the shifting grains in that wonderful kaleidoscope, the human frame.

If there is no intelligent human soul, there can be no infinite divine soul. Epicurus, the amiable, simple-hearted, cheerful, and kindly, was an atheist, an atheist on theory and an atheist on principle, an atheist because he thought atheism good. He had his arguments, neither few nor feeble. But

they all resulted at last in the argument of every man who believes in the senses, and who thinks the senses ought to be supremely gratified. Here is the proof stated in the simplest form, the atheist's perpetual demonstration. If there were a designing and a beneficent Creator, he said, mankind would be satiated with animal delights. Satiated they are not, therefore there is no designing and beneficent Creator. In other words, every good father feeds his children with sugar-plums; but instead of sugar-plums we are perpetually cracking our teeth upon pebbles, disguised by a very thin crust of sweetened flour; there is then no good Father. And yet, singularly inconsistent as it may seem, even Epicurus would not call himself an atheist. Though he believed in nothing but motes of matter, though he admitted no spiritual essence out of which a God might be made, had no work for a God to do, had no heaven for a God to dwell in, though his senses afforded him no hint of God's existence, and he found no evidence thereof in Nature, seeing that he scouted all notions of design, still he was constrained to fancy that beings existed somewhere who enjoyed in perfection the bliss after which he sighed in vain; and he loved to talk about his celestial Epicureans enjoying their eternal dolce far niente, in a happy region midway between the worlds, where no rain touched them, nor snow, and the whiff of the whirling atoms was unfelt. A sort of celestial Lazzaroni they were, living in an everlasting Naples; the air about them always serene, the light always brilliant, their seats fair and downy, their sole occupation the dreamy sense of their own idle felicity. These were the only true, the only adorable Gods; the only true, because divested of the attributes which belong to humanity, and released from the human necessity of thought, labor, and sadness; the only adorable, because, being unable to bestow any rewards upon their worshippers, they could be contemplated with calmer mind and waited on with more simple and sincere devoutness. Superfluous are all invocations, prayers, and sacrifices; idle is the worship which the fear-oppressed multitude offers. The impious man is not he who rejects the deities which the vulgar revere, but he who imputes to deity the acts and attributes which the vulgar praise. Belief in the VOL. LXXI. - 5TH S. VOL. IX. NO. I.

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popular gods is the only atheism. Yet Epicurus visited the public temples, and with such aspect of reverence, that one Diocles is reported as having exclaimed, "Jupiter, thou never appearest to me so great as when Epicurus is at thy knees."

A strange notion of the universe! A universe that is a winged heap of sand! Men that are bundles of nerves! Deities that are placid wreaths of midsummer mist! But Epicurus was gentle and kindly, and the theory, as projected from his mind, had its genial side. We must grant that it was well meant. Epicurus had no thought of being an enemy of his kind. To deliver mortals from superstitious terrors was the sole wish of the amiable philosopher. He would banish the appalling phantoms of the unseen world, and rid nature of hobgoblins. Anything in his judgment was better than brimstone and the Devil. Better be a sprightly heap of dancing dirt-specks than the sad sport of an iron destiny, or the hapless victim of capricious gods. Happier is it to look forward to a quiet annihilation presently, than to go shivering through life at the prospect of miseries hereafter. It is the fear of death, he said, that makes life bitter. But the fear of death is only the fear of that nameless something which may accompany or follow death; it is the fear of retribution and the horrid realm of ghosts. Freed from these terrors, there can be no dread of death. For life is good so long as it lasts, and death puts an end to it when it is good no longer. What is death but an idle word? When we are; death is not; and when death is, we are not. We do not feel it, for it stops feeling; and what causes no pain when present, it is foolish to fear when far off. All good and evil is in sensation; and as death is simply the absence of sensation, of course it is nothing either to the dead or the living. The same logic disposes of the future. Why live in apprehension of the future? he said. It is no present possession, which we may apprehend the loss of; nor is it a past possession, over whose loss we may grieve. We never had it, and we were never deprived of it. It is simply nothing at all, and, as Mr. Toots said, it is of no consequence. Be tranquil; take life as it comes; pluck the flower that is blooming; sufficient unto itself is each day's evil and good.