His standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain.

But he had (and this was the Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure; at least in his later years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently.

He was not insensible to pleasures; but he deemed very few of them worth the price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid for them.

The greater number of miscarriages in life he considered to be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures.

Accordingly, temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers -- stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences--was with him, as with them, almost the central point of educational precept.