Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/181

 rank, if he meant the same pleasure that Aristippus did he ought to have adopted the same thing as the chief good that he did; if he meant the same that Hieronymus did, he would then have been assigning the first rank to Hieronymus's pleasure, and not to that of Aristippus.

For, as to what he says, that it is decided by the senses themselves that pleasure is a good and that pain is an evil, he has attributed more weight to the senses than the laws allow them. We are the judges of private actions, but we cannot decide anything which does not legally come under the cognisance of our tribunal; and, in such a case, it is to no purpose that judges are in the habit, when they pronounce sentence, of adding, “if the question belongs to my jurisdiction;” for, if the matter did not come under their jurisdiction, this additional form of words would not any the more give validity to their decision. Now, what is it that the senses are judges of? Whether a thing is sweet or bitter, soft or hard, near or far off; whether it is standing still or moving; whether it is square or round. What sentence, then, will reason pronounce, having first of all called in the aid of the knowledge of divine and human affairs, which is properly called wisdom; and having, after that, associated to itself the virtues which reason points out as the mistresses of all things, but which you make out to be only the satellites and handmaidens of pleasures? The sentence, however, of all these qualities, will pronounce first of all, respecting pleasure, that there is no room for it; not only no room for its being placed by itself in the rank of the chief good, which is what we are looking for, but no room even for its being placed in connexion even with what is honourable.

The same sentence will be passed upon freedom from pain; Carneades also will be disregarded; nor will any definition of the chief good be approved of, which has any close connexion with pleasure, or freedom from pain, or which is devoid of what is honourable. And so it will leave two, which it will consider over and over again; for it will either lay down the maxim, that nothing is good except what is honourable, nothing evil except what is disgraceful; that everything else is either of no consequence at all, or, at all events, of only so much, that it is neither to be sought after nor avoided, but only selected or rejected; or else, it will prefer that which it