Abstract theory was to be valued only just so far as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind from suppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly visionary, leaving it in flawless evenness of surface to the impressions of an experience, concrete and direct.
To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding ourselves of such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions--to be rid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often only misrepresent the experience of which they profess to be the representation--idola, idols, false appearances, as Bacon calls them later--to neutralise the distorting influence of metaphysical system by an all-accomplished metaphysic skill: it is this bold, hard, sober recognition, under a very "dry light," of its own proper aim, in union with a habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps open a wide doorway to human weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic doctrine, to reproductions of this doctrine in the time of Marius or in our own, their gravity and importance.

It was a [142] school to which the young man might come, eager for truth, expecting much from philosophy, in no ignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than an "initiation." He would be sent back, sooner or later, to experience, to the world of concrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt by him; but with a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from the tyranny of mere theories.
So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed the death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself as if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant school of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, on its fresh upland by the sea.

Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed.

And towards such a full or complete life, a life of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight.

Liberty of soul, freedom from all partial and misrepresentative doctrine which does but relieve one element in our experience at the cost of another, freedom from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on the future: this would be but preliminary to the real business of education--insight, insight through culture, into all that the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.
From that maxim of [143] Life as the end of life, followed, as a practical consequence, the desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising one's self in them, till one's whole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards the vision--the "beatific vision," if we really cared to make it such--of our actual experience in the world.