han Italian gardens, on a certain breezy table-land
projecting from the African coast, some hundreds of miles southward
from Greece. There, in a delightful climate, with something of
transalpine temperance amid its luxury, and withal in an inward
atmosphere of temperance which did but further enhance the brilliancy
of human life, the school of Cyrene had maintained itself as almost one
with the family of its founder; certainly as nothing coarse or unclean,
and under the influence of accomplished women.

Aristippus of Cyrene too had left off in suspense of judgment as to
what might really lie behind--flammantia moenia mundi: the flaming
ramparts of the world. Those strange, bold, sceptical surmises, which
had haunted the minds [135] of the first Greek enquirers as merely
abstract doubt, which had been present to the mind of Heraclitus as one
element only in a system of abstract philosophy, became with Aristippus
a very subtly practical worldly-wisdom. The difference between him and
those obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that between an ancient
thinker generally, and a modern man of the world: it was the difference
between the mystic in his cell, or the prophet in the desert, and the
expert, cosmopolitan, administrator of his dark sayings, translating
the abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first of all, of
sentiment. It has been sometimes seen, in the history of the human
mind, that when thus translated into terms of sentiment--of sentiment,
as lying already half-way towards practice--the abstract ideas of
metaphysics for the first time reveal their true significance. The
metaphysical principle, in itself, as it were, without hands or feet,
becomes impressive, fascinating, of effect, when translated into a
precept as to how it were best to feel and act; in other words, under
its sentimental or ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the great
master of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows, and that we,
even as they, never continue in one stay, might indeed have taken
effect as a languid, enervating, consumptive nihilism, as a precept of
"renunciation," which would touch and handle and busy itself with
nothing. But in the reception of [136] metaphysical formulae, all
depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the
pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they
fall--the company they find already present there, on their admission
into the house of thought; t