rejection of pleasure, was the ultimate good, the chief end of man. This philosophy taught that man's wants and desires should be reduced to the smallest possible amount; that all sensational enjoyments must be as much as possible forsworn, as being of an enslaving tendency, and as at variance with the true nature of man.
14. I remark, in conclusion, that this doctrine obviously has its roots in the Socratic psychology, which I formerly endeavoured to expound to you; in the doctrine, namely, that thought, and not sensation, is that which constitutes the true nature of man; that thought, the opposite of sense, is itself an act in which man frees himself from sensation, appetite, and desire; and that, therefore, this act or thought itself testifies in its very origin what the duty of man is, what the obligation is under which he lies; testifies, namely, that he is bound to rise superior to the lower promptings of his nature, and to refuse to be the slave of the passive modifications of his soul. Such is the groundwork of the Cynical ethics. They were built upon a right foundation. They inculcated self-restraint, not on mere prudential grounds, as the Cyrenaics did, but on deeper grounds, lying in the very constitution of man himself; for they held that it was only through self-restraint, or a liberation from his sensational condition, that man was truly man. Their error lay in their pushing this doctrine to an extreme, and in preaching and prac-
