In other respects Epicurus bore the reputation of being a kind, benevolent, and genial companion. [1374] His teaching bears the same impress. It meets the inexorable sternness of the Stoics by insisting on compassion and forgiveness, [1375] and supersedes its own egotism by the maxim that it is more blessed to give than to receive. [1376] The number of such maxims on record is, no doubt, limited; nevertheless, the whole tone of the Epicurean School is a pledge of the humane and generous character of its moral teaching. [1377] To this trait that School owes its chief importance in history. By its theory of utility it undoubtedly did much harm, partly exposing, partly helping forward, the moral decline of the classic nations. Still, by drawing man away from the outer world within himself, by teaching him to seek happiness in the beautiful type of a cultivated mind content with itself, it contributed quite as much as Stoicism, though after a gentler fashion, to the development and the extension of a more independent and more universal morality. CHAPTER XXI. THE EPICUREAN SYSTEM AS A WHOLE; ITS POSITION IN HISTORY. [A. Inner connection of the Epicurean teaching.] It has often been urged against the Epicurean philosophy, that it is deficient both in coherence and consistency. Nor is this objection without foundation. If we come to the study of it, looking for a complete scientific groundwork, or a strictly logical development, we shall certainly be disappointed. It is not difficult to show in what contradictions Epicurus was involved; in professing to trust the senses wholly and entirely, and yet going beyond the senses to the hidden causes of things; in despising logical forms and laws, and at the same time building up his whole system on deductions; in holding that all sensations are true, but yet maintaining that a portion of the realities which they represent as belonging to things is only relative. Nor were these the only inconsistencies. At one time only natural causes and laws are acknowledged, and any such thing as free will and imagination is ignored; at another, by the doctrine of the swerving aside of atoms and of the human will, unexplained caprice is elevated to the rank of law. Pleasures and pains are all referred to bodily sensations, and yet mental states are called higher and more important; nay, more, even from a basis of selfishness rules and precepts of humanity, justice, love, faithfulness, and devotion are deduced. It ought not, however, to be forgotten that the Stoics, to whom the claim of clear and consistent thought cannot be denied, were involved in similar difficulties. They, like the Epicureans, built up a rational system on a basis of the senses. They, too, constructed an ideal theory of morals on a material groundwork of metaphysics. They, too, declared that universal law is the only active power, whilst they maintained that reality belongs only to the world of matter. They, too, deduced a