If, therefore, it missed something in the commerce of life, which some other theory of practice was able to include, if it made a needless sacrifice, then it must be, in a manner, inconsistent with itself, and lack theoretic completeness.
Did it make such a sacrifice?
What did it lose, or cause one to lose?
And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaicism is ever the characteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in its survey--sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical.

It is one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man's life there) which it may be said to be the special vocation of the young to express.

In the school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh Greek world, we see this philosophy where it is least blase, as we say; in its most pleasant, its blithest and yet perhaps its wisest form, youthfully bright in the youth of European thought.

But it grows young again for a while in almost every youthful soul.

It is spoken of sometimes as the appropriate utterance of jaded men; but in them it can hardly be sincere, or, by the nature of the case, an enthusiasm.