TWO:CHAPTER XVIBut here he looked at me in a curious manner, scrutinising my face, as if he asked himself: "Is he pulling my leg, or not?" But not a muscle in my face moved, so that the "Captain" nodded approvingly ... and wrote out a pass for me to go to Vis��! I was not allowed to go to Li��ge, for, as he said, he did not yet know himself how matters stood there. The other officers overwhelmed me with questions: how matters stood in The Netherlands, and whether Great Britain had already27 declared war against us? I think that at that question I looked utterly perplexed, for in the same breath they told me all they knew about the danger of war for The Netherlands: Great Britain first sent an ultimatum to The Netherlands, to force her into joining the Allies against Germany, and as she had refused, the British Fleet was now on its way to Flushing. I explained to them in detail that they were utterly wrong, but they believed only a half of what I said.

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TWO:After eliminating all the sources of misery due to folly and vice, Epicurus had still to deal with what, in his opinion, were the most formidable obstacles to human happiness, dread of the divine anger and dread of death, either in itself, or as the entrance on another life. To meet these, he compiled, for we can hardly say constructed, an elaborate system of physical philosophy, having for its object to show that Nature is entirely governed by mechanical causes, and that the soul perishes with the body. We have already mentioned that for science as such and apart from its ethical applications he neither cared nor pretended to care in the least. It seems, therefore, rather surprising that he could not manage, like the Sceptics before him, to get rid of supernaturalism by a somewhat more expeditious method. The explanation seems to be that to give some account of natural phenomena had become, in his time, a necessity for every one aspiring to found a philosophical system. A brilliant example had been set by Plato and Aristotle, of whom the former, too, had apparently yielded to the popular demand rather than followed the bent of his own genius, in turning aside from ethics to physics; and Zeno had similarly included the whole of knowledge in his teaching. The old Greek curiosity respecting the causes of things was still alive; and a similar curiosity was doubtless awakening among those populations to whom Greek civilisation had been carried by colonisation, commerce, and conquest. Now, those scientific speculations are always the76 most popular which can be shown to have some bearing on religious belief, either in the way of confirmation or of opposition, according as faith or doubt happens to be most in the ascendent. Fifty years ago, among ourselves, no work on natural philosophy could hope for a large circulation unless it was filled with teleological applications. At present, liberal opinions are gaining ground; and those treatises are most eagerly studied which tend to prove that everything in Nature can be best explained through the agency of mechanical causation. At neither period is it the facts themselves which have excited most attention, but their possible bearing on our own interests. Among the contemporaries of Epicurus, the two currents of thought that in more recent times have enjoyed an alternate triumph, seem to have co-existed as forces of about equal strength. The old superstitions were rejected by all thinking men; and the only question was by what new faith they should be replaced. Poets and philosophers had alike laboured to bring about a religious reformation by exhibiting the popular mythology in its grotesque deformity, and by constructing systems in which pure monotheism was more or less distinctly proclaimed. But it suited the purpose, perhaps it gratified the vanity of Epicurus to talk as if the work of deliverance still remained to be done, as if men were still groaning under the incubus of superstitions which he alone could teach them to shake off. He seems, indeed, to have confounded the old and the new faiths under a common opprobrium, and to have assumed that the popular religion was mainly supported by Stoic arguments, or that the Stoic optimism was not less productive of superstitious terrors than the gloomy polytheism which it was designed to supersede.152

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ONE:CHAPTER XXXIV. A CLEVER MOVE.

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ONE:

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THANKS FOR VISITING US

The boy also had been obliged to retire into France, had been transported from Rheims to Havre, and from there, across the sea, back to Belgium. "Five times already, my dear parents, I have been in the fight; I have asked them not to let me wait long for the sixth. Oh, you cannot imagine how glorious it is to be allowed to fight for my country! Have confidence in the future, dear parents, and say a paternoster for me and my comrades and also one for our Fatherland."

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We may, indeed, fairly ask what guarantee against wrong-doing of any kind could be supplied by a system which made the supreme good of each individual consist in his immunity from pain and fear, except that very pain or fear which he was above all things to avoid? The wise man might reasonably give his assent to enactments intended for the common good of all men, including himself among the number; but when his concrete interest as a private citizen came into collision with his abstract interests as a social unit, one does not see how the quarrel was to be decided on Epicurean principles, except by striking a balance between the pains respectively resulting from justice and injustice. Here, Epicurus, in his anxiety to show that hedonism, rightly understood, led to the same results as the accepted systems of morality, over-estimated the policy of honesty. There are cases in which the wrong-doer may count on immunity from danger with more confidence than when entering on such ordinary enterprises as a sea-voyage or a commercial speculation; there are even cases where a single crime might free him from what else would be a lifelong dread. And, at worst, he can fall back on the Epicurean arguments proving that neither physical pain nor death is to be feared, while the threats of divine vengeance are a baseless dream.147It took only seconds for the race to conclude.

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