While we are with Stevenson, we may as well conclude our selections from the Epicurean scriptures in these words from his Christmas Sermon: "Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality: they are the perfect duties. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say, 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better men."
Pleasure is our great task, "the gist of life, the end of ends." To be happy ourselves and radiating centres of happiness to choice circles of congenial friends,--this is the Epicurean ideal. The world is a vast reservoir of potential pleasures. Our problem is to scoop out for ourselves and our friends full measure of these pleasures as they go floating by. We did not make the world. It made itself by a fortuitous concourse of atoms. It would be foolish for us to try to alter it. Our only concern is to get out of it all the pleasure we can; without troubling ourselves to put anything valuable back into it. Since it is accidental, impersonal, we owe it nothing. We simply owe ourselves as big a share of pleasure as we can grasp and hold.
This, however, is a task in which it is easy to make mistakes. We need prudence to avoid cheating ourselves with short-lived pleasures that cost too much; wisdom to choose the simpler pleasures that cost less and last longer. Such shrewd calculation of the relative cost and worth of different pleasures is the sum and substance of the Epicurean philosophy. He who is shrewd to discern and prompt to snatch the most pleasure at least cost, as it is offered on the bargain counter of life,--he is the Epicurean sage.
We might work this out into a great variety of applications: but one or two spheres must suffice. Eating and drinking, as the most elemental relations of life, are the ones commonly chosen as applications of the Epicurean principle. These applications, however, the selections from Epicurus and Horace have already made clear.
The Epicurean will regulate his diet, not by the immediate, trivial, short-lived pleasures of taste, though these he will by no means despise, but mainly by their permanent effects upon health. Wholesome food, and enough of it, daintily prepared and served, he will do his best to obtain. But elaborate and ostentatious feasting he will avoid, as involving too much expense and trouble, and too heavy penalties of disease and discomfort. He will find out by practical experience the quantity, quality, and variety of simple food that keeps him in perfect condition; and no enticements of sweetmeats or stimulants will divert him from the simplicity in which the most permanent pleasure is found. To eat cake and candy between meals, to sip tea at all hours, no less than to drink whiskey to the point of intoxication, are sins against the simplicity of the true Epicurean regimen.