This appears in the teaching of Epicurus in two ways. The first example is in his explanation of the origin of the cosmos. Democritus had conceived that irregular motion was an inherent quality of the atoms and that the universe was produced by their combinations in a purely mechanical way. Epicurus conceived that the original movement of the atoms was in a straight line from above downwards. This he called the “rain of atoms.” To explain their intermingling he conceived them to be endowed with volition by which they arbitrarily deviated from the direct fall. Secondly, this physical theory of Epicurus would be unimportant except that it afforded him a basis for his theory of the individual as possessing free will. The doctrine of freedom of the will had been since Aristotle a presupposition indispensable to the doctrine of moral accountability among the Greeks. The Stoic doctrine of fate is an exception. But determinism was opposed to Epicurus’ conception of the Wise Man as an independent individual. The human will is self-determined, and Epicurus even said that he preferred the illusions of religion to a belief in our slavery to fate. He classed freedom and chance together as uncaused occurrence, and out of the combination built his conception of freedom. The uncaused functioning of the will in man is the same as the causeless deviation of the atoms. Freedom is the choice between different possibilities and is determined by no cause. The Stoics alone among the philosophers of this time are the forerunners of the study of physics. Epicurus introduced the conception of volition of the atoms to account for the origin of the cosmos. From that point he conceived the world to develop in a mechanical way. Teleology in the nature world was repugnant to him. By modifying the Democritan physics, he thus succeeded in establishing the independence of the individual in the social world and, on the other hand, removing the gods from interfering in the physical world. This seemed to Epicurus to afford an absolute deliverance from superstition. The important points of the physical theory of Epicurus are these: (1) the freedom of the atoms in motion; (2) and yet their mechanical development; (3) the atomic character of the gods; (4) the scattering of the atoms of the soul at death, which frees us from the fear of Hades. CHAPTER XI STOICISM