God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures, Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her!
The idealizing of the victim is useful for a time: if virtue is the greatest of goods, and if subjection makes people virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their virtue.
Education in cruelty and fear is bad, but no other kind can be given by those who are themselves the slaves of these passions.
I was not born happy. As a child, my favourite hymn was :‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin.’ At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unedurable. In adolescense, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.
Children were idealized by Wordsworth and un-idealized by Freud. Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come.
I come now to the question of forms of government, and it is natural to begin with absolute monarchy, as the oldest, simplest, and most widespread of the constitutions known in historical times.
Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world.
A king or despot can maintain his power if he is astute in internal politics and successful externally. If he is quasi-divine, his dynasty may be prolonged indefinitely. But the growth of civilisation puts an end to belief in his divinity; defeat in war is not always avoidable; and political astuteness cannot be an invariable attribute of monarchs. Therefore sooner or later, if there is no external conquest, there is revolution, and the monarchy is either abolished or shorn of its power.
Power over opinion, like all other forms of power, tends to coalescence and concentration, leading logically to a State monopoly. But even apart from war it would be rash to assume that a State monopoly of propaganda must make a government invulnerable. In the long run, those who possess the power are likely to become too flagrantly indifferent to the interests of the common man, as the Popes were in the time of Luther.
We have seen that monarchy and oligarchy have both merits and demerits. The principal demerit of both is that, sooner or later, the government becomes so indifferent to the desires of ordinary men that there is revolution.
A government is usually called ‘democratic’ if a fairly large percentage of the population has a share of political power. The most extreme Greek democracies excluded women and slaves, and America considered itself a democracy before women had the vote. Clearly an oligarchy approaches more nearly to a democracy as the percentage possessed of political power increases. The characteristic features of oligarchy only appear when this percentage is rather small.
Popular Cynicism did not teach abstinence from the good things of this world, but only a certain indifference to them.
External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.
He urges his young disciple and friend Pythocles to “flee from every form of culture.” It was a natural consequence of his principles that he advised abstinence from public life, for in proportion as a man achieves power he increases the number of those who envy him and therefore wish to do him injury.
The wise man will try to live unnoticed, so as to have no enemies.
According to Cicero, he held that “friendship cannot be divorced from pleasure, and for that reason must be cultivated, because without it neither can we live in safety and without fear, nor even pleasantly.
Epicurus was a materialist, but not a determinist. He followed Democritus in believing that the world consists of atoms and the void; but he did not believe, as Democritus did, that the atoms are at all times completely controlled by natural laws.
The principle that we ought to obey God rather than man has been interpreted by Christians in two different ways. God’s commands may be conveyed to the individual conscience either directly, or indirectly through the medium of the Church.
There was a very general development, first from monarchy to aristocracy, then to an alternation of tyranny and democracy.
Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe.