Note 50 — Chapter XIX · THE MORAL SCIENCE OF THE EPICUREANS. GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

In other respects Epicurus bore the reputation of being a kind, benevolent, and genial companion.50 His teaching bears the same impress. It meets the inexorable sternness of the Stoics by insisting on compassion and forgiveness,51 and supersedes its own egotism by the maxim that it is more blessed to give than to receive.52 The number of such maxims on record is, no doubt, limited; nevertheless, the whole tone of the Epicurean School is a pledge of the humane and generous character of its moral teaching.53 To this trait that School owes its chief importance in history. By its theory of utility it undoubtedly did much harm, partly exposing, partly helping forward, the moral decline of the classic nations. Still, by drawing man away from the outer world within himself, by teaching him to seek happiness in the beautiful type of a cultivated mind content with itself, it contributed quite as much as Stoicism, though after a gentler fashion, to the development and the extension of a more independent and more universal morality.