ches, no true confession of its
crimes, would ever be complete that ignored that incident. This
indefeasible character in experience makes a first sort of ideal
immortality, one on which those rational philosophers like to dwell who
have not speculation enough to feel quite certain of any other. It was a
consolation to the Epicurean to remember that, however brief and
uncertain might be his tenure of delight, the past was safe and the
present sure. "He lives happy," says Horace, "and master over himself,
who can say daily, I have lived. To-morrow let Jove cover the sky with
black clouds or flood it with sunshine; he shall not thereby render
vain what lies behind, he shall not delete and make never to have
existed what once the hour has brought in its flight." Such
self-concentration and hugging of the facts has no power to improve
them; it gives to pleasure and pain an impartial eternity, and rather
tends to intrench in sensuous and selfish satisfactions a mind that has
lost faith in reason and that deliberately ignores the difference in
scope and dignity which exists among various pursuits. Yet the
reflection is staunch and in its way heroic; it meets a vague and feeble
aspiration, that looks to the infinite, with a just rebuke; it points to
real satisfactions, experienced successes, and asks us to be content
with the fulfilment of our own wills. If you have seen the world, if you
have played your game and won it, what more would you ask for? If you
have tasted the sweets of existence, you should be satisfied; if the
experience has been bitter, you should be glad that it comes to an end.

Of course, as we have seen, there is a primary demand in man which death
and mutation contradict flatly, so that no summons to cease can ever be
obeyed with complete willingness. Even the suicide trembles and the
ascetic feels the stings of the flesh. It is the part of philosophy,
however, to pass over those natural repugnances and overlay them with as
much countervailing rationality as can find lodgment in a particular
mind. The Epicurean, having abandoned politics and religion and being
afraid of any far-reaching ambition, applied philosophy honestly enough
to what remained. Simple and healthy pleasures are the reward of simple
and healthy pursuits; to chafe against them because they are limited is
to import a foreign and disruptive element into the case; a healthy
hunger has its limit, and its satisfaction reaches a natural term.
P