Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/43

1.] feature in the Ethics of Epicurus, that absence of pain is pleasure, and that absence of pleasure  is pain. Such a neutral state would, they maintained, be a state of insensibility as complete as that of a person in profound sleep. Accordingly they declared the chief end of life to be the pursuit of pleasure. They were also as decided as any nominalist could be in limiting pleasure to the particular feeling of the moment—the actual, concrete, present feeling of gratification. It was no ideal happiness of others, no abstraction like "the greatest happiness of the greatest number"; it was not even an ideal "good on the whole" of the individual agent himself, that they held forth as the supreme aim of human endeavor. It was pleasure, not happiness. Happiness, they point out, is a system embracing past and future, as well as present, pleasures. But the past has perished forever, and the future is beyond our ken. The present alone is ours; and therefore present enjoyment is the sole object in which the wise man can be interested.

Such was the general drift of the speculations under the influence of which the doctrines of Hegesias were developed. The hedonistic principle, underlying those speculations, obtrudes two ethical problems. As the science of Ethics professes to be a rational explanation of the moral life of man, it must, in the first place, find a rational foundation for the virtues by showing that they are the forms of conduct by which alone the reasonable end of existence can be secured, and it must, in the second place, show that that end is, under the conditions of existence, attainable.

Now, what is the experience of Cyrenaic Hedonism with regard to the former problem? If pleasure is the sole object for which it is reasonable to live, how can we vindicate those social virtues which require a man to sacrifice his own enjoyments for the benefit of others, or even those private virtues which imply the abandonment of sensual gratifications? The Cyrenaics did not shirk the problem. On the contrary, they claimed to solve it by the same general explanation which subsequent hedonists have commonly repeated,—by showing that