efly in its presence.
From that maxim of [143] Life as the end of life, followed, as a
practical consequence, the desirableness of refining all the
instruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all their
capacities, of testing and exercising one's self in them, till one's
whole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards the
vision--the "beatific vision," if we really cared to make it such--of
our actual experience in the world. Not the conveyance of an abstract
body of truths or principles, would be the aim of the right education
of one's self, or of another, but the conveyance of an art--an art in
some degree peculiar to each individual character; with the
modifications, that is, due to its special constitution, and the
peculiar circumstances of its growth, inasmuch as no one of us is "like
another, all in all."

CHAPTER IX: NEW CYRENAICISM

[144] SUCH were the practical conclusions drawn for himself by Marius,
when somewhat later he had outgrown the mastery of others, from the
principle that "all is vanity." If he could but count upon the
present, if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to
conduct one anywhere beyond itself, if men's highest curiosity was
indeed so persistently baffled--then, with the Cyrenaics of all ages,
he would at least fill up the measure of that present with vivid
sensations, and such intellectual apprehensions, as, in strength and
directness and their immediately realised values at the bar of an
actual experience, are most like sensations. So some have spoken in
every age; for, like all theories which really express a strong natural
tendency of the human mind or even one of its characteristic modes of
weakness, this vein of reflection is a constant tradition in
philosophy. Every age of European thought has had its Cyrenaics or
Epicureans, under many disguises: even under the hood of the monk.

[145] But--Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!--is a proposal,
the real import of which differs immensely, according to the natural
taste, and the acquired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table.
It may express nothing better than the instinct of Dante's Ciacco, the
accomplished glutton, in the mud of the Inferno;+ or, since on no
hypothesis does man "live by bread alone," may come to be identical
with--"My meat is to do what is just and kind;" while the soul, which
can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil
of im