ve, was fairly chargeable.--Not, however, with "hedonism" and its
supposed consequences. The blood, the heart, of Marius were still
pure. He knew that his carefully considered theory of practice braced
him, with the effect of a moral principle duly recurring to mind every
morning, towards the work of a student, for which he might seem
intended. Yet there were some among his acquaintance who jumped to the
conclusion that, with the "Epicurean stye," he was making
pleasure--pleasure, as they so poorly conceived it--the sole motive of
life; and they precluded any exacter estimate of the situation by
covering it with a high-sounding general term, through the vagueness of
which they were enabled to see the severe and laborious youth in the
vulgar company of Lais. Words like "hedonism"-- [151] terms of large
and vague comprehension--above all when used for a purpose avowedly
controversial, have ever been the worst examples of what are called
"question-begging terms;" and in that late age in which Marius lived,
amid the dust of so many centuries of philosophical debate, the air was
full of them. Yet those who used that reproachful Greek term for the
philosophy of pleasure, were hardly more likely than the old Greeks
themselves (on whom regarding this very subject of the theory of
pleasure, their masters in the art of thinking had so emphatically to
impress the necessity of "making distinctions") to come to any very
delicately correct ethical conclusions by a reasoning, which began with
a general term, comprehensive enough to cover pleasures so different in
quality, in their causes and effects, as the pleasures of wine and
love, of art and science, of religious enthusiasm and political
enterprise, and of that taste or curiosity which satisfied itself with
long days of serious study. Yet, in truth, each of those pleasurable
modes of activity, may, in its turn, fairly become the ideal of the
"hedonistic" doctrine. Really, to the phase of reflection through
which Marius was then passing, the charge of "hedonism," whatever its
true weight might be, was not properly applicable at all. Not
pleasure, but fulness of life, and "insight" as conducting to that
fulness--energy, variety, and choice of experience, including [152]
noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old
story of Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, such
as Seneca and Epictetus--whatever form of human life, in short, might