charm, nor beams the ruddy moon with face unchanged; why harass with eternal designs a mind too weak to compass them?" God in his providence shrouds in the darkness of night the issue of future time, and smiles if a mortal flutter to pierce further than he may. Be careful to regulate serenely what is present with you; all else is swept along in the fashion of the stream, which at one time, within the heart of its channel, peacefully glides down to the Tuscan sea; at another, whirls along worn stones and uprooted trees and flocks and houses all together, amid the roaring of the hills and neighbouring wood, whene'er a furious deluge chafes the quiet rills. He will live master of himself, and cheerful, who has the power to say from day to day, 'I have lived! tomorrow let the Sire overspread the sky either with cloudy gloom or with unsullied light; yet he will not render of no effect aught that lies behind, nor shape anew and make a thing not done, what once the flying hour has borne away."' All things change and pass away, nor has man himself any abiding destiny; his best wisdom is to clutch from the hands of Fate the flowers she offers, for they perish even as he thinks to gather them. This logic of Omar and of Horace is also the logic of Ecclesiastes. "Too much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. For what hath man of all his labour, and of all the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry; for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life which God giveth him under the sun."

"1

When we compare the Eastern with the Western, the Persian and Hebraic with the Greek and Roman, expressions of the Cyrenaic principle, we cannot help feeling that, while the common basis of both is a profound moral scepticism, the loss of faith in any enduring end or sub

1 Horace, Odes, iii. 29 (Lonsdale and Lee's trans.)

stantial good in life, this scepticism has engendered in the one case a pessimistic mood which is hardly perceptible in the other. Omar and Ecclesiastes clutch at the delights of sense and time, the pleasure of the moment, as the only refuge from the moral despair which reflection breeds. The only cure for the ills of thought is a careless and unthinking abandon to the pleasures of the present. But always in the background of the mind, and, whenever reflection is reawakened, in the foreground too, is the sad and irresistible conviction that, for a rational being, such a merely sentient good is in strictness no good at all; that for a being whose very nature it is to look before and after, and to consider the total meaning of his life, such a preoccupation with the experience of the moment, as the only moral reality, must render life essentially unmeaning and not worth living. It is little wonder, therefore, that this moral scepticism soon became philosophically speechless. Even the Cyrenaics were unable to maintain their self-consistency in the statement of it. An ethic of pure sensibility, an absolute Hedonism, is impossible. A merely sentient good cannot be the good of a being who is rational as well as sentient; the true life of a reflective being cannot be unreflective. In order to construct an ideal, some reference to reason is necessary; even a successful sentient life implies the guidance and operation of thought. Accordingly, we find even the Cyrenaics admitting, in spite of themselves, that prudence is essential to the attainment of pleasure. man must be master of himself, as a rider is master of his horse; he must be able to say of his pleasures that he is their possessor, not they his-έxw, ovк Exoμaι. Such self-mastery and self-possession is the work of reason, and a life which is not thus rationally ordered must soon be wrecked on the shoals of appetite and passion.

A

2. (B) Modified Hedonism: (a) Ancient, or Epicureanism. This rehabilitation of the Socratic master

virtue of prudence, suggested by the later Cyrenaics, was completed by the Epicureans, who, after the Platonic and Aristotelian insistence on the supreme claims of reason in the conduct of human life, find it impossible to conceive a good from which reason has been eliminated, or to which reason does not point the way. The end of life, they hold, is not the pleasure of the moment, but a sum of pleasures, a pleasant life. All that was necessary, to effect the transition from the Cyrenaic extreme to this moderate type of Hedonism, was to press to its logical development the Socratic principle that a truly happy, or consistently pleasant, life must be also a rational, reflective, and well-considered life. Even within the Cyrenaic school, we find an approach towards the moderate or Epicurean position. Theodorus, a later member of the school, holds that the end is not momentary pleasure, but a permanent state of gladness (xapá); and Hegesias, still later, maintains that painlessness, reached through indifference to pain, rather than positive pleasure or enjoyment, is the attainable end of life. These suggestions were developed, through the reassertion of the Socratic principle of prudence, strengthened by the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine of the guiding function of reason in the life of a rational being, into the Epicurean system.

Epicurus fully recognises the indispensableness of reason in the conduct of life. The end is pleasure, but this end cannot be attained except under the guidance of reason; feeling would be but a blind and perilous guide to its own satisfaction. Reason is the handmaid of sensibility, and without the aid of the former the latter would be reduced to impotency. The task of life is discovered, and its accomplishment is tested, by sensibility; but the execution of the task is the work of reason. For it is reason alone that makes possible the most perfect gratification of feeling, eliminating the pain as far as possible, reducing the shocks and jars to

a minimum, and, where the pain is unavoidable, showing how it is the way to a larger and more enduring, a deeper and intenser, pleasure. The happiness of man is a subtler and more enduring satisfaction than that of which the animal, preoccupied with the feeling of the moment, is capable. Man's susceptibilities to pleasure and pain are so much keener and more varied, his horizon, as a rational being, is so much larger than the animal's, that the same interpretation will not serve for both lives. He cannot shut out the past and the future, and surrender himself, with careless limitation, to the momentary 'now.' It is the outlook, the horizon, the prospect and the retrospect, that give the tone to his present experience. He abides, though his experience changes; and his happiness must, just because it is his, be permanent and abiding as the self whose happiness it is. Atomic moments of pleasure cannot, therefore, be the good of man; that good must be a life of pleasure. An unorganised or chaotic life, at the beck and call of every stray desire, would be a life not of happiness but of misery to such a being as man; in virtue of his rational nature, he must organise his life, must build up its moments into the hours and days and years of a total experience. While, therefore, the end or fundamental conception under which he must bring all his separate activities, the ultimate unifying principle of his life, is sentient satisfaction; while the ultimate term of human experience is not reason, but sensibility, and man's good is essentially identical with the animal's, -yet so different are the means to their accomplishment, so different is the conduct of the two lives, that the interests of clear thinking demand the emphatic assertion of the difference, no less than of the identity. "Wherefore," says Epicurus, "we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good. From it is the commencement of every choice and every aversion, and to it we come back, and make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good

thing. And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but ofttimes pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And ofttimes we consider pains superior to pleasures, and submit to the pain for a long time, when it is attended for us with a greater pleasure. All pleasure, therefore, because of its kinship with our nature, is a good, but it is not in all cases our choice; even as every pain is an evil, though pain is not always, and in every case, to be shunned. It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these things must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil, and the evil, on the contrary, as a good." "It is not an unbroken succession of drinking feasts and of revelry, not the pleasures of sexual love, nor the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a splendid table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the reasons for every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which greatest tumults take possession of the soul. Of all this, the beginning, and the greatest good, is prudence. Wherefore, prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy from it grow all the other virtues,-for it teaches. that we cannot lead a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice, nor lead a life of prudence, honour, and justice which is not also a life of pleasure. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them." 1

Deeper reflection upon the course of human affairs led the Epicureans, as it had led the Cyrenaics, to pessimism. The good, in the sense of positive pleasure, is not, they find, the lot of man; all that he may hope for is the negative pleasure that comes with the release from pain. "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain from the body and of trouble from the soul." And even this is not

1 Letter of Epicurus (Wallace's Epicureanism, pp. 129-131).