Initiation into Philosophy | Page 9

emanate from it. As
often happens, the vague commencements of Stoicism bore a close
resemblance to its end. The Stoics of the last centuries of antiquity
were a sort of mendicant friars, ill-clothed, ill-fed, of neglected
appearance, despising all the comforts of life; the Cynics at the time of
Alexander were much the same, professing that happiness is the
possession of all good things, and that the only way to possess all
things is to know how to do without them. It was Antisthenes who
founded this school, or rather this order. He had been the pupil of
Socrates, and there can be no doubt that his sole idea was to imitate
Socrates by exaggeration. Socrates had been poor, had scorned wealth,
had derided pleasure, and poured contempt on science. The cult of
poverty, the contempt for pleasures, for honours, for riches, and the
perfect conviction that any knowledge is perfectly useless to man--that
is all the teaching of Antisthenes. That can lead far, at least in
systematic minds. If all is contemptible except individual virtue, it is
reversion to savage and solitary existence which is preached: there is no
more civilization or society or patriotism. Antisthenes in these ideas
was surpassed by his disciples and successors; they were cosmopolitans
and anarchists. The most illustrious of this school--illustrious especially
through his eccentricity--was Diogenes, who rolled on the ramparts of
Corinth the tub which served him as a house, lighted his lantern in
broad daylight on the pretext of "searching for a man," called himself a
citizen of the world, was accused of being banished from Sinope by his

fellow-countrymen and replied, "It was I who condemned them to
remain," and said to Alexander, who asked him what he could do for
him: "Get out of my sunshine; you are putting me in the shade."
CRATES; MENIPPUS; ARISTIPPUS.--Crates of Thebes is also
mentioned, less insolent and better-mannered, yet also a despiser of the
goods of this world; and Menippus, the maker of satires, whom Lucian,
much later, made the most diverting interlocutor of his amusing
dialogues. In an opposite direction, at the same epoch, Aristippus, a
pupil of Socrates, like Antisthenes, founded the school of pleasure, and
maintained that the sole search worthy of man was that of happiness,
and that it was his duty to make himself happy; that in consequence, it
having been sufficiently proved and being even self-evident, that
happiness cannot come to us from without, but must be sought within
ourselves, it is necessary to study to know ourselves thoroughly (and
this was from Socrates) in order to decide what are the states of the
mind which give us a durable, substantial, and, if possible, a permanent
happiness. Now the seeker and the finder of substantial happiness is
wisdom, or rather, there is no other wisdom than the art of
distinguishing between pleasure and choosing, with a very refined
discrimination, those which are genuine. Wisdom further consists in
dominating misfortunes by the mastery of self so as not to be affected
by them, and in dominating also pleasures even whilst enjoying them,
so that they may not obtain dominion over us; "possessing without
being possessed" was one of his mottoes which Horace thus translated:
"I strive to subject things to myself, not myself to things." This
eminently practical wisdom, which is only a highly-developed egoism,
is that of Horace and Montaigne, and was expressed by Voltaire in
verses that were sometimes felicitous.
THE SCHOOL OF CYRENE.--Aristippus had for successor in the
direction of his school, first his daughter Arete, then his grandson. The
Aristippists, or Cyrenaics (the school being established in Cyrene),
frankly despised the gods, regarding them as inventions to frighten
women and little children. One of them, Euhemerus, invented the
theory, which in part is false and in part accurate, that the gods are
simply heroes, kings, great men deified after their death by the

gratitude or terror of the populace. As often happens, philosophic
theories being essentially plastic and taking the form of the
temperament which receives them, a certain Cyrenaic (Hegesias)
enunciated the doctrine that the supreme happiness of man was suicide.
In fact, if the object of man is happiness, since life affords far fewer
joys than sorrows, the philosophy of happiness is to get rid of life, and
the sole wisdom lies in suicide. It does not appear that Hegesias gave
the only proof of sincere belief in this doctrine which can be given by
anyone professing it.


CHAPTER VII
EPICUREANISM
Epicureanism Believes that the Duty of Man is to Seek Happiness, and
that Happiness Consists in Wisdom.
MORAL PHILOSOPHY.--Continuing to feel the strong impulse which
it had received from Socrates, philosophy was now for a long while to
be almost exclusively moral philosophy. Only it divided very sharply in
two