Pope had not the remotest idea that he was an epicurean. He believed that his system of ethics, with happiness for an end and virtue for the means, was new to philosophy, and he did not hesitate to state that all "the learned" who preceded him had been "blind."[922] He exemplified his assertion by the instance of the epicureans and stoics. The stoics reversed the terms of the epicurean formula; virtue alone was their end, and happiness, the spontaneous, unsought consequence. The real characteristics of these great rival schools were unknown to Pope. He described them by false contrasts, and ignorantly charged them with the folly of defining "happiness to be happiness." Greatest wonder of all, he alleged against the epicurean doctrine, which was his own, that it "sunk men to beasts."[923] He would naturally expound the systems he understood the best, and hence we may estimate the extent of his qualifications for dismissing every previous ethical theory with compendious contempt. A sentence from Bolingbroke bears witness to the scanty knowledge of Pope, and discloses the source of his scorn. "I think," writes Bolingbroke, "you are not extremely conversant in the works of Plato, and you may suspect therefore that I aggravate the impertinence of his doctrines."[924] The impertinent doctrines were a portion of the divine platonic ethics, and Pope, uninstructed in the most famous systems of the ancients, did but reiterate the superficial contempt of his master. In place of the "mad opinions" of learned moralists, Pope enjoins us to "take nature's path,"[925] little dreaming that he was repeating the maxim of the sects he despised. "The perfection of man," says Diogenes Laertius, quoting Zeno, the founder of the stoic school, "is to follow nature, and that is to live virtuously, for nature leads us to that." All the moralists accepted nature for their oracle; but the scholars gave different versions of her responses. Pope in his second epistle insisted that man was too weak to interpret them. A Newton, he said, who could "climb from art to art" would inevitably be baffled in morals, for whatever "reason wove, passion would undo."[926] In the fourth epistle the difficulty has vanished; "all states can reach, all heads conceive" happiness, and its parent morality; "there needs but thinking right, and meaning well."[927] To think rightly and do rightly, which was before impossible for even the lords of human kind, is declared to be within easy reach of all the world. Nature spoke with two voices to Pope, and what one voice affirmed the other denied.