Note 80 — Chapter XVII · THE EPICUREAN VIEWS ON NATURE.

Allowing that many of these statements are natural consequences of the principles of Epicurus, the distinction between a rational and an irrational soul must, nevertheless, at first sight seem strange in a system so thoroughly materialistic as was that of the Epicureans. And yet this distinction is not stranger than the corresponding parts of the Stoic teaching. If the Stoic views may be referred to the distinction which they drew in morals between the senses and the reason, not less are the Epicurean ethics marked by the same contrast between the general and the sensuous side of the mind. Hence Epicurus shares the Stoic belief in an ethereal origin of the human race;80 and although this belief as at first expressed only implies that man, like other living beings, is composed of ethereal elements, yet there is connected with it the distinction already discussed in the case of the Stoics between the higher and the lower parts of man, which ultimately comes to be simply another mode of expressing the difference between mind and matter.