Returning to the account of the doctrines held by Hegesias and his followers, we need not dwell on the obvious want of expository method displayed by Diogenes Laërtius,—a defect which seriously impairs the value of his whole history. With a very little attention, however, it is not difficult to grasp the essential drift of Hegesiac philosophy, especially when the statements of Diogenes are read in connection with his general account of the Cyrenaic School, in which the Hegesiacs are described as forming merely a minor sect. To understand, therefore, the phase of speculative thought represented by this sect, it is necessary to refer, at least, to the salient features of that Cyrenaic Hedonism of which it professed to be merely a modification.
Our knowledge of the Cyrenaic School, gathered from the account of Diogenes Laërtius, as well as from various other notices brought together in the well-known collections of Mullach and of Ritter and Preller, is fairly complete and satisfactory. We here come, for the first time in history, upon a doctrine which, in its logical principles and procedure, forms a remarkably interesting anticipation of a type of ethical theory which continues to assert its claims upon the philosophical thought of our day. From a notice of the Cyrenaic School by Sextus Empiricus,[1] it appears that they started from that speculative standpoint which, under such various names as Sensationalism, Scepticism, Positivism, Agnosticism, has almost uniformly led to Hedonism in ethical speculation. They limited the knowledge of man to his feelings (πἀθη). What causes these feelings, or whether they have any causes at all, were questions relegated to the region of the Unknowable. Each man's feeling is therefore the criterion of truth for him; universal criterion there is none.
Feelings being thus recognized as the sole realities that we know, it became necessary to seek the real good of man in them. Now the Cyrenaics held that there are only two kinds of feeling, positive pleasure and positive pain: they explicitly rejected the doctrine, which afterwards became a prominent
- ↑ Adversus Mathematicos, vii, 191-6.
