Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/45

1.] thus conceived to be dependent on a man's own prudence, it was also held to be completely within his control; and the Theodoreans therefore insisted as strongly as the Stoics, that the wise man is self-sufficient, able to draw his well-being from sources within himself.

But this very doctrine, which commonly involves ennobling issues in speculation as well as in practice, was made the ground on which the Theodorean code of morals refused to find a place for the disinterested virtues, or even for the virtues of personal purity. If the obligations of friendship or patriotism are enjoined, the wise man has to reply that, as he is not in want of anything extraneous to himself, he has no need of friends or of any other human relations. A similar treatment was accorded to those obligations which point to purity of individual character; the pleasures, of which these obligations demand a sacrifice, were declared to be disgraceful, not in their own nature, but by the common consent of ignorant men. In fact, Theodorus seems to have entertained a Carlylean scorn for the common type of mankind; and any disinterested labor for men in general, or any concern for their good or bad opinion, was, in his view, a regard for fools, wholly unworthy of the wise man.

The Cyrenaic Hedonism thus broke down in the hands of the Theodoreans by recognizing its inability to explain the common obligations of morality, and thus failing to solve the first of the two problems imposed upon all ethical theories. This conclusion, though not that to which the name of Pessimism is commonly applied, may yet be deemed pessimistic enough; for the position and prospects of humanity are hopelessly