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30 the so-called sacrifices of a spiritual and disinterested morality are only apparent or temporary. Such a vindication of morality, however, assumes that the virtues of civilized man are, in the long run, uniformly coincident with his happiness. This complacent Optimism gleams through the whole literature of Epicurean Ethics. It was especially brilliant in the eighteenth century among the moralists and theologians of the Illumination; and even popular writers—novelists, essayists, sermonizers—are never weary of ringing changes on their favorite theme of the delightfulness of living virtuously, and the inevitable misery of vice. But a jarring note occasionally breaks this harmony of utilitarian moralists. Their optimistic faith is rudely shaken at times by a daring sceptic asking whether it is really the fact that virtue's ways are uniformly ways of pleasantness. This dissent has grown within recent times; and since the publication of Professor Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics, it would probably be difficult to find an eminent thinker who maintains, without theological or other explanations, the absolute coincidence of virtue and happiness.

In this issue of Hedonism the Cyrenaic thinkers have anticipated the perplexing conclusion forced upon the hedonistic Ethics of our day by the criticism of Mr. Sidgwick and other writers. The utilitarian vindication of the virtues was explicitly rejected by Theodorus the Cyrenaic. Theodorus is a remarkable figure in the history of ancient thought, and it is scarcely possible to repress the wish that fuller information with regard to him had come down to us. The information we possess has a somewhat perplexing aspect. For apparently he did more than any other Cyrenaic to purify the fundamental principle of Hedonism by working out a more refined conception of the enjoyment which forms the chief end of existence. In the purified Hedonism of Theodorus and his followers the sovereign good of man is not pleasure, but a cheerful state of mind , which has its source in an intelligent regulation of the conduct , while the chief evil of life is not pain , but that disagreeable condition which results from imprudence. As the sovereign good of life was