hat experience itself, is not really so great as it
seems; and as the highest and most disinterested ethical formulae,
filtering down into men's everyday existence, reach the same poor level
of vulgar egotism, so, we may fairly suppose that all the highest
spirits, from [21] whatever contrasted points they have started, would
yet be found to entertain, in the moral consciousness realised by
themselves, much the same kind of mental company; to hold, far more
than might be thought probable, at first sight, the same personal types
of character, and even the same artistic and literary types, in esteem
or aversion; to convey, all of them alike, the same savour of
unworldliness. And Cyrenaicism or Epicureanism too, new or old, may be
noticed, in proportion to the completeness of its development, to
approach, as to the nobler form of Cynicism, so also to the more nobly
developed phases of the old, or traditional morality. In the gravity
of its conception of life, in its pursuit after nothing less than a
perfection, in its apprehension of the value of time--the passion and
the seriousness which are like a consecration--la passion et le serieux
qui consacrent--it may be conceived, as regards its main drift, to be
not so much opposed to 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 economist