only just so far as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind from
suppositions no more than half realisable, or wholly visionary, leaving
it in flawless evenness of surface to the impressions of an experience,
concrete and direct.

To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding ourselves
of such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions--to be
rid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often only
misrepresent the experience of which they profess to be the
representation--idola, idols, false appearances, as Bacon calls them
later--to neutralise the distorting influence of metaphysical system by
an all-accomplished metaphysic skill: it is this bold, hard, sober
recognition, under a very "dry light," of its own proper aim, in union
with a habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps open a
wide doorway to human weakness, that gives to the Cyrenaic doctrine, to
reproductions of this doctrine in the time of Marius or in our own,
their gravity and importance. It was a [142] school to which the young
man might come, eager for truth, expecting much from philosophy, in no
ignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than an "initiation." He
would be sent back, sooner or later, to experience, to the world of
concrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt by
him; but with a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from the
tyranny of mere theories.

So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed the
death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself as
if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant school
of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, on
its fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general completeness
of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical
metaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, a
life of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effective
auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. Liberty of soul, freedom from
all partial and misrepresentative doctrine which does but relieve one
element in our experience at the cost of another, freedom from all
embarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on the
future: this would be but preliminary to the real business of
education--insight, insight through culture, into all that the present
moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so bri