Yet those beautiful gods, with the whole round of their poetic worship, the school of Cyrene definitely renounced.
[23] The old Greek morality, again, with all its imperfections, was certainly a comely thing .-- Yes! a harmony, a music, in men's ways, one might well hesitate to jar.

The merely aesthetic sense might have had a legitimate satisfaction in the spectacle of that fair order of choice manners, in those attractive conventions, enveloping, so gracefully, the whole of life, insuring some sweetness, some security at least against offence, in the intercourse of the world.

Beyond an obvious utility, it could claim, indeed but custom--use-and-wont, as we say--for its sanction.

But then, one of the advantages of that liberty of spirit among the Cyrenaics (in which, through theory, they had become dead to theory, so that all theory, as such, was really indifferent to them, and indeed nothing valuable but in its tangible ministration to life) was precisely this, that it gave them free play in using as their ministers or servants, things which, to the uninitiated, must be masters or nothing.

Yet, how little the followers of Aristippus made of that whole comely system of manners or morals, then actually in possession of life, is shown by the bold practical consequence, which one of them maintained (with a hard, self-opinionated adherence to his peculiar theory of values) in the not very amiable paradox that friendship and patriotism were things one could do without; while another--Death's-advocate, as he was called--helped so many to self-destruction, by his [24] pessimistic eloquence on the evils of life, that his lecture-room was closed.