visionary consideration, very remote upon the
intellectual ladder, just at the point, indeed, where that ladder
seemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly no
time left just now by his eager interest in the real objects so close
to him, on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground. And those
childish days of reverie, [133] when he played at priests, played in
many another day-dream, working his way from the actual present, as far
as he might, with a delightful sense of escape in replacing the outer
world of other people by an inward world as himself really cared to
have it, had made him a kind of "idealist." He was become aware of the
possibility of a large dissidence between an inward and somewhat
exclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved,
unheightened reality of the life of those about him. As a consequence,
he was ready now to concede, somewhat more easily than others, the
first point of his new lesson, that the individual is to himself the
measure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive certainty to
himself of his own impressions. To move afterwards in that outer world
of other people, as though taking it at their estimate, would be
possible henceforth only as a kind of irony. And as with the Vicaire
Savoyard, after reflecting on the variations of philosophy, "the first
fruit he drew from that reflection was the lesson of a limitation of
his researches to what immediately interested him; to rest peacefully
in a profound ignorance as to all beside; to disquiet himself only
concerning those things which it was of import for him to know." At
least he would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow its
due weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in the
conditions of man's life. [134] Just here he joined company, retracing
in his individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of human
thought, with another wayfarer on the journey, another ancient Greek
master, the founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weighty
traditional utterances (for he had left no writing) served in turn to
give effective outline to the contemplations of Marius. There was
something in the doctrine itself congruous with the place wherein it
had its birth; and for a time Marius lived much, mentally, in the
brilliant Greek colony which had given a dubious name to the philosophy
of pleasure. It hung, for his fancy, between the mountains and the
sea, among richer t