ood be approved
of, which has any close connexion with pleasure, or freedom from pain, or
which is devoid of what is honourable. And so it will leave two, which it
will consider over and over again; for it will either lay down the maxim,
that nothing is good except what is honourable, nothing evil except what
is disgraceful; that everything else is either of no consequence at all,
or, at all events, of only so much, that it is neither to be sought after
nor avoided, but only selected or rejected; or else, it will prefer that
which it shall perceive to be the most richly endowed with what is
honourable, and enriched, at the same time, with the primary good things
of nature, and with the perfection of the whole life; and it will do so
all the more clearly, if it comes to a right understanding whether the
controversy between them is one of facts, or only of words.

XIII. I now, following the authority of this man, will do the same as he
has done; for, as far as I can, I will diminish the disputes, and will
regard all their simple opinions in which there is no association of
virtue, as judgments which ought to be utterly removed to a distance from
philosophy. First of all, I will discard the principles of Aristippus, and
of all the Cyrenaics,--men who were not afraid to place the chief good in
that pleasure which especially excited the senses with its sweetness,
disregarding that freedom from pain. These men did not perceive that, as a
horse is born for galloping, and an ox for ploughing, and a dog for
hunting, so man, also, is born for two objects, as Aristotle says, namely,
for understanding and for acting as if he were a kind of mortal god. But,
on the other hand, as a slow moving and languid sheep is born to feed, and
to take pleasure in propagating his species, they fancied also that this
divine animal was born for the same purposes; than which nothing can
appear to me more absurd; and all this is in opposition to Aristippus, who
considers that pleasure not only the highest, but also the only one, which
all the rest of us consider as only one of the pleasures.

You, however, think differently; but he, as I have already said, is
egregiously wrong,--for neither does the figure of the human body, nor the
admirable reasoning powers of the human mind, intimate that man was born
for no other end than the mere enjoyment of pleasure; nor must we listen
to Hieronymus, whose chief good is the same which you sometimes, or, I
migh