Note (return) — Chapter XIII

Epicurus is at great pains to prove that the soul is material; and it can not be denied that he marshals his arguments with great skill. Modern materialism may have added additional illustrations, but it has contributed no new lines of proof. The weapons are borrowed from the old arsenal, and they are not wielded with any greater skill than they were by Epicurus himself, I. The soul and the body act and react upon each other; and mutual reaction can only take place between substances of similar nature. "Such effects can only be produced by touch, and touch can not take place without body." 813 2. The mind is produced together with the body, it grows up along with it, and waxes old at the same time with it. 814 3. The mind is diseased along with the body, "it loses its faculties by material causes, as intoxication, or by severe blows; and is sometimes, by a heavy lethargy, borne down into a deep eternal sleep." 815 4. The mind, like the body, is healed by medicines, which proves that it exists only as a mortal substance. 816 5. The mind does not always, and at the same time, continue entire and unimpaired, some faculties decay before the others, "the substance of the soul is therefore divided." On all these grounds the soul must be deemed mortal; it is dissolved along with the body, and has no conscious existence after death.