Note (return) — Chapter XIII
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The system of Epicurus is thus a system of pure materialism, but not a system of materialism drawn, as a logical consequence, from a careful and unprejudiced study of the whole phenomena of mind. His openly avowed design is to deliver men from the fear of death, and rid them of all apprehension of a future retribution. "Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means of resisting them." 817] To emancipate men from "these terrors of the mind," they must be taught "that the soul is mortal, and dissolves with the body"--that "death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to us." 818 Starting with the fixed determination to prove that