good name, his metaphysical scheme is showing signs of a like
approaching disappearance. Let us hope that it may be a speedy one; for
if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge; if man be the measure of
all things; and if law have not, as Hooker says, her fount and home in
the very bosom of God himself, then was Homer's Zeus right in declaring
man to be "the most wretched of all the beasts of the field."

And yet one cannot help looking with a sort of awe (I dare not call it
respect) at that melancholic faithless Hegesias. Doubtless he, like his
compeers, and indeed all Alexandria for three hundred years, cultivated
philosophy with no more real purpose than it was cultivated by the
graceless beaux-esprits of Louis XV.'s court, and with as little
practical effect on morality; but of this Hegesias alone it stands
written, that his teaching actually made men do something; and moreover,
do the most solemn and important thing which any man can do, excepting
always doing right. I must confess, however, that the result of his
teaching took so unexpected a form, that the reigning Ptolemy,
apparently Philadelphus, had to interfere with the sacred right of every
man to talk as much nonsense as he likes, and forbade Hegesias to teach
at Alexandria. For Hegesias, a Cyrenaic like Theodorus, but a rather
more morose pedant than that saucy and happy scoffer, having discovered
that the great end of man was to avoid pain, also discovered (his
digestion being probably in a disordered state) that there was so much
more pain than pleasure in the world, as to make it a thoroughly
disagreeable place, of which man was well rid at any price. Whereon he
wrote a book called, [Greek text: apokarteroon], in which a man who had
determined to starve himself, preached the miseries of human life, and
the blessings of death, with such overpowering force, that the book
actually drove many persons to commit suicide, and escape from a world
which was not fit to dwell in. A fearful proof of how rotten the state