The steps are to be regarded as steps towards that end. Sanity of classical philosophy. The demands of sanity, though not of logic, were satisfied by this classical philosophy. On the other hand, no pervasive mechanical laws were admitted by which many of these accidents, or all of them in theory, might be calculated backwards and forwards, in contempt of moralistic categories. Monotheism thus introduced into the popular mind, in an inevitably mythical form, the radical notions of matter and of truth.
Perception strips material things of their surface properties.
Accordingly the denial of existence to sensibles and to intelligibles was never hearty until substance was denied also, and nothing existent was any longer supposed to lurk within these appearances or behind them. Moral settlement in old age. I am happy in solitude and confinement, and the furious factions into which the world is divided inspire hatred for none of them in my heart. Viability of materialism. It made me laugh afterwards to read in pedantic commentators that Lucretius abandoned his atomism whenever he was poetical, and contradicted himself in invoking Venus, when Epicurus maintains that the gods do not trouble about human affairs.