CHAPTER IX: NEW CYRENAICISM.
[144] SUCH were the practical conclusions drawn for himself by Marius, when somewhat later he had outgrown the mastery of others, from the principle that "all is vanity." If he could but count upon the present, if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to conduct one anywhere beyond itself, if men's highest curiosity was indeed so persistently baffled--then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that present with vivid sensations, and such intellectual apprehensions, as, in strength and directness and their immediately realised values at the bar of an actual experience, are most like sensations.

So some have spoken in every age; for, like all theories which really express a strong natural tendency of the human mind or even one of its characteristic modes of weakness, this vein of reflection is a constant tradition in philosophy.

Every age of European thought has had its Cyrenaics or Epicureans, under many disguises: even under the hood of the monk.
[145] But--Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!--is a proposal, the real import of which differs immensely, according to the natural taste, and the acquired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table.
It may express nothing better than the instinct of Dante's Ciacco, the accomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno;+ or, since on no hypothesis does man "live by bread alone," may come to be identical with--"My meat is to do what is just and kind;" while the soul, which can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil of immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in conforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for itself; and actually, though but with so faint hope, does the "Father's business." In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely disabused of the metaphysical ambition to pass beyond "the flaming ramparts of the world," but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation of intellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all varieties of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works, the thoughts of Marius did but follow the line taken by the majority of educated persons, though to a different issue.

Pitched to a really high and serious key, the precept--Be perfect in regard to what is here and now: the precept of "culture," as it is called, or of a complete education--might at least save him from the vulgarity and heaviness [146] of a generation, certainly of no general fineness of temper, though with a material well-being abundant enough.

Conceded that what is secure in our existence is but the sharp apex of the present moment between two hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our experience but a series of fleeting impressions:--so Marius continued the sceptical argument he had condensed, as the matter to hold by, from his various philosophical reading:--given, that we are never to get beyond the walls of the closely shut cell of one's own personality; that the ideas we are somehow impelled to form of an outer world, and of other minds akin to our own, are, it may be, but a day-dream, and the thought of any world beyond, a day-dream perhaps idler still: then, he, at least, in whom those fleeting impressions--faces, voices, material sunshine--were very real and imperious, might well set himself to the consideration, how such actual moments as they passed might be made to yield their utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity.
Amid abstract metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him at least make the most of what was "here and now." In the actual dimness of ways from means to ends--ends in themselves desirable, yet for the most part distant and for him, certainly, below the [147] visible horizon--he would at all events be sure that the means, to use the well-worn terminology, should have something of finality or perfection about them, and themselves partake, in a measure, of the more excellent nature of ends--that the means should justify the end.
With this view he would demand culture, paideia,+ as the Cyrenaics said, or, in other words, a wide, a complete, education--an education partly negative, as ascertaining the true limits of man's capacities, but for the most part positive, and directed especially to the expansion and refinement of the power of reception; of those powers, above all, which are immediately relative to fleeting phenomena, the powers of emotion and sense.