It has shared the common fate of every system which
attacks either of these great powers, the State, the
Church, and the republic of arts and letters, and
does so without relying on the support of one mem-
ber or other of the triumvirate against the others.
Science and literature, politics and religion, each and
all found themselves assailed by the system of
Epicurus. That system came forward as a philo-
sophical system, and yet it turned a hostile front to
the customary views of education and of culture, and
to the accepted methods and results of the sciences. ¹
Whilst other philosophical doctrines either supported
or did not interfere with the claims and projects of
the political world, Epicureanism openly preached a
cosmopolitan and humanitarian creed, which taught
the citizen to stand aloof from patriotic and national
obligations, and to live his own life as a human being
amongst others, in the realm of nature and not of
statecraft. ² As to religion, the case was much the
same as it was with the State. The gods, like the
government of the State, disappeared at the fiat of
Epicureanism from their commanding position above
nature, to become part and parcel of the great natural
process in which they, like all other things, live and
move and have their being. ³ Above the intellectual
structures of science and art, above the gods of

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