of mankind, we may surely believe that something was thereby reclaimed to the moral world from the waste regions of rude and undisciplined nature.
12. I proceed to give you a short account of the moral philosophy of the Cynics. If it was the tendency of the Cyrenaic school to push to an extreme the doctrine that man's good or happiness consisted in his attainment of mere sensational enjoyment, so the tendency of the Cynics was to go into the opposite extreme, and to maintain that man's good or happiness consisted in his freedom from pleasures of sensation. The Cyrenaics inculcated, as man's chief good, an indulgence, in so far as prudence permitted, in sensual gratifications; the Cynics, on the other hand, inculcated, as man's chief good, an abnegation, in so far as nature allowed, of all such gratifications. These counter-opinions came out more fully afterwards in the systems of the Epicureans and the Stoics, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter. Meanwhile, you have to bear in mind that the precursors of these later and more celebrated sects were the Cyrenaics and the Cynics.
13. The Cynical philosophy, of which Antisthenes is regarded as the founder, contended that man's true good was virtue, and not pleasure; and that virtue consisted in a freedom from all sensational indulgences. This freedom, too, might be said to be man's true happiness. Not pleasure, but the negation and
