Both fall under the charge of unduly accentuating the
ideal element, of taking the relation of our ideas for
a matter of fact. They are both forms of the à priori;
they claim to anticipate and regulate experimental
fact. And the à priori, or necessary truth, which
from given experiences deduces by rational formula
certain conclusions prior to experience of their occur-
rence, is unwelcome to Epicurus. Alike in mathe-
matics and in deductive logic he disapproved of it.
He resembles the moderns, who shrink from the iron
chain of necessary law which science in its onward
march seems to be drawing tighter and tighter round
the free-will of man and the providence of God.

Epicurus, we are told, rejected logic. But this is
only by comparison with the technical elaborations of
the theory of proposition and syllogism by the Stoics
and Aristotle. No philosopher can altogether avoid
logic, unless he ceases to render a reason for the
creed he holds. But in a system which professedly
disclaimed a scholastic character, which stood aloof
from declamation and neglected rhetoric, the ordinary
deductive logic of Aristotle, with its disproportionate
discussion of the questions of necessity and contin-
gency--and other questions of form more than of
reality--would have been of little use. As a matter of
fact, the ancient logic, especially in the hypothetical
syllogism, which was the great field of Stoic ingenuity,
has left behind a memory redolent of sophistical and
captious arguments rather than of real interest in
the metaphysical questions underlying these logical
disputes. And Epicureanism, whatever its faults,

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