or. For vice does not confine itself to language, but
penetrates also into the manners. He does not find fault with luxury
provided it to be free from boundless desires and from fear. While
speaking in this way he appears to be fishing for disciples, that men who
wish to become debauchees may become philosophers first.

Now, in my opinion, the origin of the chief good is to be sought in the
first origin of living animals. As soon as an animal is born it rejoices
in pleasure, and seeks it as a good; it shuns pain as an evil. And
Epicurus says that excellent decisions on the subject of the good and the
evil are come to by those animals which are not yet depraved. You, too,
have laid down the same position, and these are your own words. How many
errors are there in them! For by reference to which kind of pleasure will
a puling infant judge of the chief good; pleasure in stability or pleasure
in motion?--since, if the gods so will, we are learning how to speak from
Epicurus. If it is from pleasure as a state, then certainly nature desires
to be exempt from evil herself; which we grant; if it is from pleasure in
motion, which, however, is what you say, then there will be no pleasure so
discreditable as to deserve to be passed over. And at the same time that
just-born animal you are speaking of does not begin with the highest
pleasure; which has been defined by you to consist in not being in pain.

However, Epicurus did not seek to derive this argument from infants, or
even from beasts, which he looks upon as mirrors of nature as it were; so
as to say that they, under the guidance of nature, seek only this pleasure
of being free from pain. For this sort of pleasure cannot excite the
desires of the mind; nor has this state of freedom from pain any impulse
by which it can act upon the mind. Therefore Hieronymus blunders in this
same thing. For that pleasure only acts upon the mind which has the power
of alluring the senses. Therefore Epicurus always has recourse to this
pleasure when wishing to prove that pleasure is sought for naturally;
because that pleasure which consists in motion both allures infants to
itself, and beasts; and this is not done by that pleasure which is a state
in which there is no other ingredient but freedom from pain. How then can
it be proper to say that nature begins with one kind of pleasure, and yet
to put the chief good in another?

XI. But as for beasts, I do not consider that they can pronounce an