sues her course in accordance with everlasting
laws, the gods never interfering. They haunt:

The lucid interspace Of world and world
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm.

Tennyson's 'Lucretius.'

Lange considers the relation of Epicurus to the gods subjective; the
indication, probably, of an ethical requirement of his own nature. We
cannot read history with open eyes, or study human nature to its
depths, and fail to discern such a requirement. Man never has been,
and he never will be, satisfied with the operations and products of
the Understanding alone; hence physical science cannot cover all the
demands of his nature. But the history of the efforts made to satisfy
these demands might be broadly described as a history of errors--the
error, in great part, consisting in ascribing fixity to that which is
fluent, which varies as we vary, being gross when we are gross, and
becoming, as our capacities widen, more abstract and sublime. On one
great point the mind of Epicurus was at peace. He neither sought nor
expected, here or hereafter, any personal profit from his relation to
the gods. And it is assuredly a fact, that loftiness and serenity of
thought may be promoted by conceptions which involve no idea of profit
of this kind. 'Did I not believe,' said a great man. [Footnote:
Carlyle.] to me once, 'that an Intelligence is at the heart of
things, my life on earth would be intolerable.' The utterer of these
words is not, in my opinion, rendered less but more noble by the fact,
that it was the need of ethical harmony here, and not the thought of
personal happiness hereafter, that prompted his observation.

There are persons, not belonging to the highest intellectual zone, nor
yet to the lowest, to whom perfect clearness of exposition suggests
want of depth. They find comfort and edification in an abstract and
learned phraseology. To such people Epicurus, who spared no pains to
rid his style of every trace of haze and turbidity, appeared, on this
very account, superficial. He had, however, a disciple who thought it
no unworthy occupation to spend his days and nights in the effort to
reach the clearness of his master, and to whom the Greek philosopher
is mainly indebted for the extension and perpetuation of his