In a world where life is uncertain and often unpleasant, there will tend to be an emphasis on some happier supernatural future.

          There may be nothing sinister in the loss of virtually the whole body of Epicurean writings. Perhaps they were destroyed by a triumphant Church that had room for Plato and Aristotle but none for a naturalist enemy of all that Christianity proclaimed. But there is no reason to suppose any deliberate act of destruction. Papyrus rolls were by their nature delicate things. They were also far more expensive and therefore scarce in number than modern books. In any European climate, a papyrus roll would last for about a century, and then the glue that held it together would perish. Without careful recopying, a work might easily be lost.

          The last centuries of the ancient world were mostly ages of depression. There was a shortage of all the means that had so far kept libraries together. Such means as remained were naturally given to recopying works for which there was an active demand. That means Christian theology, those parts of the pagan philosophies that could be reconciled to Christianity, and the greatest products of the pagan high culture. Since, with the exception of Lucretius – whose work largely survived – the works of Epicurus and his followers were in a style remarkable only for its plainness, it is unreasonable to suppose that librarians, forced to choose what to copy and what to leave to die, would take up the 37 volumes of On Nature and not the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.

          So far as I can tell, whatever works of Epicurus survived were not studied in the Byzantine Empire. In the West, all but his name and whatever is said about him in Cicero vanished for a thousand years.

          And then something remarkable happened.
 

The Age of Reason

          For the 19th century liberal and historian of ideas William Lecky, the most striking fact about England and France in the 17th century was the decline of belief in the supernatural.(34) And the most striking instance of this fact was the collapse of belief in witchcraft.

          At the beginning of that century, belief in witchcraft had been universal and unchallenged. James VI of Scotland (1567-1625) was one of the most learned men of his day. He believed without question in witches, and was a notable persecutor. When he became King of England as well in 1603, he brought his policies with him. It was to gain favour with him that Shakespeare introduced the witchcraft theme into Macbeth.

          James procured a law that punished witchcraft with death on first conviction, even though no harm to others could be proven. This law was carried in a Parliament where Francis Bacon was a Member.

          The law was given effect throughout England, and was especially used during the interregnum years of the 1650s. In 1664, under the restored Monarchy, Sir Matthew Hale – one of the greatest jurists and legal philosophers of the age, presided over the trial of two alleged witches in Suffolk. He told the jury that there could be no doubt in the reality of witchcraft. He said:
 

For first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much; and secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument for their confidence of such a crime.(35)

          One of the witnesses called for the prosecution was Sir Thomas Browne, one of the most eminent writers of the age. Appearing as a medical expert, he assured the jury "that he was clearly of opinion that the persons were bewitched."(36) They were convicted and hanged.

          It was the same in France. In the town of St Claude, 600 persons were burnt in the early years of the century for alleged witchcraft and lycanthropy. In 1643, Cardinal Mazarin wrote to a bishop to congratulate him on his zeal for hunting out witches.

          Yet, in 1667, Colbert, the chief minister of Louis XIV, directed all the magistrates in France to receive no more accusations of witchcraft. Those convictions still obtained he frequently commuted from death to banishment. By the end of the century, witchcraft trials had all but ceased.

          In England, belief collapsed later, but even faster than in France. The last trial for witchcraft was in 1712. Jane Wenham, an old woman, was accused of the usual offences. The judge mocked the prosecution witnesses from the bench. When the jury convicted her against his directions, he made sure to obtain a royal pardon for the old woman and a pension.

          Whatever the lowest reaches of the common people might still believe, belief in witchcraft had become a joke among the educated. And because of the tone they gave to the whole of society, disbelief spread rapidly beyond the educated. Anyone who tried to maintain its existence was simply laughed at. Laws that had condemned tens or hundreds of thousands to death, and usually to the most revolting tortures before death, were now sneered into abeyance.

          We should expect that a change of opinion so immense had been accompanied by a long debate – something similar to the debates of the 19th century over Darwinism, or to the debates of the day over the toleration of nonconformity. Yet Lecky maintains that there was almost no debate worth mentioning. There were sceptics, like Montaigne, who disbelieved all accounts of the supernatural, or Hobbes, who was a materialist and atheist. But, while, book after book appeared in England during the late 17th century to defend the existence of witches and the need for laws against them, almost no one bothered to argue that witches did not exist.

          Lecky says:
 

Several... divines came forward...; and they made witchcraft, for a time, one of the chief subjects of controversy. On the other side, the discussion was extremely languid. No writer, comparable in ability to Glanvil, More, Cudworth, or even Casaubon, appeared to challenge the belief; nor did any of the writings on that side obtain any success at all equal to that of [Glanvil].(37)

          Belief in witchcraft perished with hardly a direct blow against it. What seems to have happened, Lecky argues, is a change of world view in which belief in witches ceased to have any explanatory value. We live in a world where, orthodox religion aside, belief in the supernatural is confined to the uneducated or the stupid or the insane. But if we step outside the consensus in which we live, we should see that there is nothing in itself irrational about belief in the supernatural, nor even in witches. The belief is perfectly rational granted certain assumptions.

          Let us assume that the world is filled with invisible and very powerful beings, that some of these are good and some evil, that some human beings are capable of establishing contact with these evil beings, and that some compact can be made in which the power of the evil beings is transferred to human control. Granting these assumptions, it becomes reasonable to ascribe great or unusual events to magical intervention, and to accept that it should be the purpose of the law to check such intervention.

          Now, the Platonic philosophies do accept the existence of such beings. That is how Plato reconciled his One Creator with the many gods of the Greek pantheon. This belief was taken over by the Church Fathers, who simply announced that the ancient gods were demons. It then continued into the 17th century. It seemed to explain the world. Doubtless, cases came to light of false accusations and of people convicted because they were ill rather than possessed by demons. But our own awareness of corrupt policemen and false convictions does not lead us to believe that there are no murderers and that murder should not be punished. So it was with witchcraft.

          During the 17th century, however, the educated classes came increasingly to believe that the world operated according to known, impersonal laws, and that God – assuming His Existence – seldom interfered with the working of these secondary laws. In such a view of the world, the supernatural had no place. Belief in witchcraft, therefore, did not need opposition. It perished as collateral damage to the system of which it was a part.
 

The Epicurean Revival

          Lecky ascribes this intellectual change to the growth of scepticism. This may have been part of the answer. But while sceptics doubt the existence of the supernatural, they do not necessarily affirm the existence of invariable laws of nature. A more powerful cause of the change may have been the revival of Epicureanism during the first half of the 17th century.

          In this revival, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) is the most important philosopher. A French priest and professor of philosophy, he conceived a strong dislike both of Aristotelianism and of the new philosophy of Descartes. He turned instead to Epicurus. His work falls into two parts. First, there is the immense scholarship with which he went through every extant ancient source to try to reconstruct what Epicurus had said. Second, there is his attempted reconciliation of Epicureanism and orthodox Christianity.

          Briefly put, his reconciliation is to deny that the atoms have existed from eternity and to deny that motion is natural to them. The atoms were created by God, and they move in paths directed by God. This being so, he cleared the way for a view of the universe in which God exists, but operates by secondary causes. For all practical purposes, knowledge of the world is to be obtained by observing the world.(38)

          I say again that influences are very hard things to trace. But there is no doubt that Gassendi had made all that remained of the Epicurean writings available in one convenient place, and had made some attempt to remove any charge of impiety. These were important achievements. The Dialogues of Cicero were part of the standard education; and educated men would probably have read some Lucretius. But hardly anyone had bothered to hunt out all the references that set these into a greater whole. No one had yet collected these in a single place. And no one had yet laboured to overcome the religious prejudices that worked to prevent an impartial reception of what had survived.

          Nor is there any doubt that Epicureanism began suddenly to exert a decisive influence over at least English science from about the middle of the 17th century.

          Edwin N. Hooker writes:
 

Scientists found [Epicurean physics] a highly useful working hypothesis in their investigations in physical nature. But by 1660 the working hypothesis had been blown up into a very different shape, and in its altered shape was being peddled as the final truth concerning nature, man, and human society. The new monster had a wide appeal. In 1662 Edward Stillingfleet wrote in Origines Sacrae that of all theories the Epicurean at that time was making the greatest noise in the world. A few years later John Wilkins, the remarkable Bishop of Chester who had been for years the leading spirit in that amazing group of scientists laboring at Oxford (a group which became the nucleus of the Royal Society), commented on the extravagant and irrational opinions then afloat, inspired by Epicurus and his atoms. A little later Ralph Cudworth, probably the most learned member of the Cambridge Platonists, remarked that of late there had been an extraordinary enthusiasm for Epicurus. From all sides came testimony to the effect that Epicurus had indeed risen from the dead and that the atomistic theory had burst its seams.(39)

          What had risen from the dead may sometimes have been the Epicureanism of the Master. But much was that of Gassendi. Both Locke and Newton appear to have read Gassendi. There are obvious similarities between them and this version of Epicurus. Newton, for example, constructs his physics in terms of matter and motion through a void. For him, light is a stream of atoms. He accepts the revised physics of Gassendi, denying any implicit motion to atoms, and then goes further with his hypothesis of action at a distance, or gravity.(40)

          For the growth of empiricism and utilitarianism, it would be necessary to write a book. These are both similar to the ideas of Epicurus. They emerged in an intellectual climate where Epicurus had been made available again and where he had been made respectable to Christian orthodoxy. There is no necessary reason to suppose that these facts are connected. It may be that interest in Epicurus had revived in a civilisation that was autonomously moving toward the same general approach. But it does seem reasonable to suppose a connection.

          If, however, there was a connection, it was not merely a revival of Epicurus and his philosophy. As in every other recovery of ancient thought, save perhaps the cultural, the moderns very quickly transcended the ancients. The moderns began by revering the giants on whose backs they had climbed. They soon grew into giants in their own right.

          I have already mentioned the differences between Epicurus and ourselves with regard to the natural sciences. Knowledge for us is valued not mainly because it liberates us from mental pain, but because it contributes to mental and physical happiness. We observe. We form hypotheses. We experiment. We make use of the mathematics that Epicurus derided. We use the knowledge thereby gained to change our conditions of life. We check suffering. We cure illness. We extend life. We fill our lives with the wealth that comes from our knowledge.

          With regard to his ethical theories, the modern utilitarians have also gone beyond Epicurus. They begin with the same premise, that the purpose of life is happiness, but pass then to the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This leads them straight into the politics that Epicurus rejected – to an investigation of what social orders are most productive of the general happiness, and to a willingness to argue for the removal of impediments to that happiness.

          We can add to this the knowledge of economics that comes from the application of Newtonian physics to human affairs – that is, the investigation of the natural forces that lead spontaneously to the generation and maintenance of an order in which individuals pursue their own happiness and promote the happiness of others – we come inevitably to the doctrine of individual rights that is implicit in the philosophy of Epicurus and that is central to modern classical liberalism.
 

The Debt We Owe to Epicurus

          Thomas Jefferson understood the value of Epicurus. In 1819, he wrote to a friend:
 

As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us... Their great crime [the stoics] was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention.(41) So too did Ludwig von Mises. In Human Action, he says:           The historical role of the theory of the division of labor as elaborated by British political economy from Hume to Ricardo consisted in the complete demolition of all metaphysical doctrines concerning the origin and the operation of social cooperation. It consummated the spiritual, moral and intellectual emancipation of mankind inaugurated by the philosophy of Epicureanism.(42)

          When classical liberals and libertarians discuss the intellectual roots of their ideas, they are quick to cite Aristotle and Aquinas. It would show justice if Epicurus could be given at least equal place of honour.

          Indeed, whether or not you call yourself a libertarian, if you are content to live in a world in which you can make the best for yourself and your loved ones, in which there are no supernatural terrors, but instead a body of natural science that assists us in the pursuit of happiness, you too are an Epicurean.

          We have virtually everything that Plato wrote and almost nothing that Epicurus wrote. But Plato has had no discernable impact on the social sciences beyond providing legitimation to various cliques of demented and often murderous intellectuals. For all we have so few of his writings, the ideas of Epicurus have survived. And they have made the world a better place.(43)