The investigation of nature with a view to eliminating the fear of death as a factor in human conduct, clearly enounced as it is in the poem of the Roman Epicurean, is still more emphatically expressed in a “fundamental maxim” of Epicurus himself: “If we did not allow ourselves to be disturbed by suspicious fears of celestial phenomena; if the terrors of death were never in our minds; and if we would but courageously discuss the limits of our nature as regards pain and desire: we should then have no need to study Natural Philosophy.”[91] The exclusion of Dialectics,[92] and the subordination of Physics to Ethics, restricted—if, indeed, it were a restriction—the scope of character and intelligence to the sphere of conduct, and it is in the light of this limitation that the full significance of the Epicurean definition of Philosophy lies—“Philosophy is an active principle which aims at securing Happiness by Reason and Discussion.” Here we have in practical completion that identification of Philosophy with Ethics towards which the whole tendency of Greek speculation had been consciously or unconsciously working, and which was fully consummated in the later development of the Stoic and Epicurean systems. The combined effect of this principle of Epicureanism, and of the contemporaneous failure of political interest, was to direct attention to those less ostentatious, but, for happiness, more effective virtues, which flourish in private society and in the daily intercourse of mankind. Because it excluded Dialectics, and because it was excluded from Politics, the gospel of the Garden established an ideal of homely virtue which lay within the reach of the average man, who, like Epicurus himself, was repelled by Plato’s distance from life, and did not feel called upon to cherish impracticable schemes of ameliorating society under the dominion of a Demetrius the Liberator, but was willing to content himself with a humbler range of duty, with being temperate and chaste in his habits, simple and healthy in his tastes, cheerful and serene in his personal bearing, amiable and sympathetic with his friends, and cultivating courteous relations in those slightly more extended social circles where comity and tact take the place of the more intimate and familiar virtues of household life.[93]