Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/182

 shall perceive to be the most richly endowed with what is honourable, and enriched, at the same time, with the primary good things of nature, and with the perfection of the whole life; and it will do so all the more clearly, if it comes to a right understanding whether the controversy between them is one of facts, or only of words.

XIII. I now, following the authority of this man, will do the same as he has done; for, as far as I can, I will diminish the disputes, and will regard all their simple opinions in which there is no association of virtue, as judgments which ought to be utterly removed to a distance from philosophy. First of all, I will discard the principles of Aristippus, and of all the Cyrenaics,—men who were not afraid to place the chief good in that pleasure which especially excited the senses with its sweetness, disregarding that freedom from pain. These men did not perceive that, as a horse is born for galloping, and an ox for ploughing, and a dog for hunting, so man, also, is born for two objects, as Aristotle says, namely, for understanding and for acting as if he were a kind of mortal god. But, on the other hand, as a slow moving and languid sheep is born to feed, and to take pleasure in propagating his species, they fancied also that this divine animal was born for the same purposes; than which nothing can appear to me more absurd; and all this is in opposition to Aristippus, who considers that pleasure not only the highest, but also the only one, which all the rest of us consider as only one of the pleasures.

You, however, think differently; but he, as I have already said, is egregiously wrong,—for neither does the figure of the human body, nor the admirable reasoning powers of the human mind, intimate that man was born for no other end than the mere enjoyment of pleasure; nor must we listen to Hieronymus, whose chief good is the same which you sometimes, or, I might say, too often call so, namely, freedom from pain; for it does not follow, because pain is an evil, that to be free from that evil is sufficient for living well. Ennius speaks more correctly, when he says,—

Let us define a happy life as consisting, not in the repelling of evil, but in the acquisition of good; and let us seek to procure it, not by doing nothing, whether one is feeling plea-