Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/339

284 a higher morality, the aim of which is rather the perfection than the happiness of our nature. Hence two paths of moral inquiry were opened up to his disciples. The Cyrenaics, led by Aristippus, entered on the one of these paths, and proclaimed happiness, in the sense of mere pleasure, as the summum bonum, or ultimate good, for man; while the Cynics, led by Antisthenes, maintained that virtue, or the perfecting of his nature, was man's true end, and that this end was to be attained only by repressing his desires and curtailing his wants within the smallest possible limits. The Megarics, again, left the Socratic conception of the good in its original indetermination; or, at any rate, the only explanation of it which they suggested was, that the good in itself and true Being in itself were identical—a proposition not without value and significance, when we consider that man, in fostering his true being, is promoting his true good, and that he attains to what is truly his good just in proportion as he attains to what is truly his being. So much, then, in regard to the imperfect Socraticists, the Cyrenaic, the Cynic, and the Megaric schools of philosophy.

18. Before going on with the history of philosophy, I shall introduce at this place an ethical discussion of a somewhat digressive character, attempting to explain a subject on which I touched in the preceding paragraph: I mean the obscurity in which Socrates left his conception of the good, and his vacillating