[23] The old Greek morality, again, with all its imperfections, was
certainly a comely thing.--Yes! a harmony, a music, in men's ways,
one might well hesitate to jar. The merely aesthetic sense might
have had a legitimate satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair
order of choice manners, in those attractive conventions, enveloping,
so gracefully, the whole of life, insuring some sweetness, some
security at least against offence, in the intercourse of the world.
Beyond an obvious utility, it could claim, indeed but custom--use-
and-wont, as we say--for its sanction. But then, one of the
advantages of that liberty of spirit among the Cyrenaics (in which,
through theory, they had become dead to theory, so that all theory,
as such, was really indifferent to them, and indeed nothing valuable
but in its tangible ministration to life) was precisely this, that it
gave them free play in using as their ministers or servants, things
which, to the uninitiated, must be masters or nothing. Yet, how
little the followers of Aristippus made of that whole comely system
of manners or morals, then actually in possession of life, is shown
by the bold practical consequence, which one of them maintained (with
a hard, self-opinionated adherence to his peculiar theory of values)
in the not very amiable paradox that friendship and patriotism were
things one could do without; while another--Death's-advocate, as he
was called--helped so many to self-destruction, by his [24]
pessimistic eloquence on the evils of life, that his lecture-room was
closed. That this was in the range of their consequences--that this
was a possible, if remote, deduction from the premisses of the
discreet Aristippus--was surely an inconsistency in a thinker who
professed above all things an economy of the moments of life. And
yet those old Cyrenaics felt their way, as if in the dark, we may be
sure, like other men in the ordinary transactions of life, beyond the