MORAL PHILOSOPHY.--Continuing to feel the strong impulse which it had received from Socrates, philosophy was now for a long while to be almost exclusively moral philosophy. Only it divided very sharply in two directions. Antisthenes and Aristippus were both pupils of Socrates. From Antisthenes came the Cynics; from Aristippus the philosophers of pleasure. The Cynics gave birth to the Stoics, the philosophers of pleasure to the Epicureans, and these two great schools practically divided all antiquity between them. We will take the Epicureans first because, chronologically, they slightly preceded the Stoics. EPICURUS.--Epicurus, born at Athens a little after the death of Plato, brought up at Samos by his parents who had been forced to expatriate themselves owing to reverses of fortune, returned to Athens about 305 B.C., and there founded a school. Personally he was a true wise man, sober, scrupulous, a despiser of pleasure, severe to himself, _in practice_ a Stoic. As his general view of the universe, he taught approximately the doctrine of Democritus: the world is composed of a multitude of atoms, endowed with certain movements, which attach themselves to one another and combine together, and there is nothing else in the world. Is there not a first cause, a being who set all these atoms in motion--in short, a God? Epicurus did not think so. Are there gods, as the vulgar believe? Epicurus believed so; but he considered that the gods are brilliant, superior, happy creatures, who do not trouble about this world, do not interfere with it, and are even less occupied, were it possible, with mankind. Also they did not create the world, for why should they have created it? From goodness, said Plato; but there is so much evil in the world that if they created it from goodness, they were mistaken and must be fools; and if they willingly permitted evil, they are wicked; and therefore it is charitable towards them to believe that they did not create it.