the old morality, as an exaggeration of one special motive in it.

Some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own
nature, and of the nature of things, to another, Marius seemed to
have detected in himself, meantime,--in himself, as also in those old
masters of the Cyrenaic philosophy. If they did realise the
monochronos hedone+ as it was called--the pleasure of the "Ideal Now"--
if certain moments of their lives were high-pitched, passionately
coloured, intent with sensation, [22] and a kind of knowledge which,
in its vivid clearness, was like sensation--if, now and then, they
apprehended the world in its fulness, and had a vision, almost
"beatific," of ideal personalities in life and art, yet these moments
were a very costly matter: they paid a great price for them, in the
sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies, of things only to be
enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in
intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take
nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical
truths. In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek
religion, and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but
faulty economists. The Greek religion was then alive: then, still
more than in its later day of dissolution, the higher view of it was
possible, even for the philosopher. Its story made little or no
demand for a reasoned or formal acceptance. A religion, which had
grown through and through man's life, with so much natural strength;
had meant so much for so many generations; which expressed so much of
their hopes, in forms so familiar and so winning; linked by
associations so manifold to man as he had been and was--a religion
like this, one would think, might have had its uses, even for a
philosophic sceptic. Yet those beautiful gods, with the whole round
of their poetic worship, the school of Cyrene definitely renounced.