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Rh it in a form too abstract for human nature to endure; for in a right and complete ethical system allowance must be made for the unessential as well as for the essential elements of human nature; the sensational no less than the higher and antagonist elements of his being must be taken into account. All that is necessary is that the lower principles should not be allowed to predominate: it is neither necessary nor possible that they should be altogether extirpated or suppressed. Such extirpation or suppression was what the Cynical philosophy inculcated, and therefore it erred in being abstract and extreme; and in being abstract and extreme it became partial and one-sided; in a word, it became a form of imperfect Socraticism.

15. The founder of the Megaric sect was Euclid, a philosopher whom you must not confound with the mathematician of that name. On the death of Socrates, in the year 399 B.C., Euclid retired to his birthplace, Megara, a town distant about twenty-six miles from Athens; and here he established the Megaric school of philosophy. The chief characteristic of this school was, that it set forth "the good" as the main category, the leading universal in all things. Whatever was real was good. The Megaric philosophers derived their doctrines from the Eleatics no less than from Socrates. What the Eleatics called Being, that, namely, which must be thought of in all that is thought, the Megarics called the good. Everything