Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/288

 steering of navigation, it follows unavoidably that that also must have been established by, and must proceed from, something else. But it is agreed among almost all people, that that object with which prudence is conversant, and which it wishes to arrive at, ought to be fitted and suited to nature, and to be of such a character as by itself to invite and attract that desire of the mind which the Greeks call ὁρμή. But as to what it is which causes this excitement, and which is so greatly desired by nature from its first existence, it is not agreed; and, indeed, there is a great dissension on the subject among philosophers whenever the chief good is the subject of investigation: for the source of this whole question which is agitated as to the chief good and evil, when men inquire what is the extreme and highest point of either, must be traced back, and in that will be found the primitive inducements of nature; and when it is found, then the whole discussion about the chief good and evil proceeds from it as from a spring.

VII. Some people consider the first desire to be a desire of pleasure, and the first thing which men seek to ward off to be pain: others think that the first thing wished for is freedom from pain, and the first thing shunned, pain; and from these men others proceed, who call the first goods natural ones; among which they reckon the safety and integrity of all one's parts, good health, the senses unimpaired, freedom from pain, strength, beauty, and other things of the same sort, the images of which are the first things in the mind, like the sparks and seeds of the virtues. And of these three, as there is some one thing by which nature is originally moved to feel desire, or to repel something, and as it is impossible that there should be anything except these three things, it follows unavoidably that every duty, whether of avoiding or of pursuing anything, is referred to some one of these things; so that that prudence, which we have called the art of life, is always conversant about some one of these three things from which it derives the beginning of the whole life: and from that which it has pronounced to be the original cause by which nature is excited, the principle of what is right and honourable arises; which can agree with some one of these three divisions; so that it is honourable to do everything for the sake of pleasure, even if you do not obtain it; or else for the