In the gravity of its conception of life, in its pursuit after nothing less than a perfection, in its apprehension of the value of time--the passion and the seriousness which are like a consecration--la passion et le serieux qui consacrent--it may be conceived, as regards its main drift, to be not so much opposed to the old morality, as an exaggeration of one special motive in it.
Some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own nature, and of the nature of things, to another, Marius seemed to have detected in himself, meantime,--in himself, as also in those old masters of the Cyrenaic philosophy.

If they did realise the monochronos hedone+ as it was called--the pleasure of the "Ideal Now"-- if certain moments of their lives were high-pitched, passionately coloured, intent with sensation, [22] and a kind of knowledge which, in its vivid clearness, was like sensation--if, now and then, they apprehended the world in its fulness, and had a vision, almost "beatific," of ideal personalities in life and art, yet these moments were a very costly matter: they paid a great price for them, in the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths.

In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty economists.
The Greek religion was then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, the higher view of it was possible, even for the philosopher.

Its story made little or no demand for a reasoned or formal acceptance.

A religion, which had grown through and through man's life, with so much natural strength; had meant so much for so many generations; which expressed so much of their hopes, in forms so familiar and so winning; linked by associations so manifold to man as he had been and was--a religion like this, one would think, might have had its uses, even for a philosophic sceptic.