s.
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.

[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 p