Note 38 — Chapter XIII
Reading edition
The answer of Cicero to the exaggerated pretensions of Epicureanism seems to express the common sense of his age, 'Where can you find an old woman fatuous enough to believe what you forsooth would have believed, if you had not studied physical science38?' The passionate protest of Lucretius seems more applicable to times of religious persecution, and to extreme forms of fanaticism in modern times, than to the tolerant spirit and the not unkindly superstition of the Greek and Roman world, as they are known in its literature. But if the experience of the modern world gives a still more startling significance to the words—