186 WISCONSIN' ACADEMY SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS. 



who thought so much of happiness that they invented for it a uew 

 term, Euroia. Tlieir views of this favorite idea appear nowhere 

 more clearly than in a long passage of Epictetus (Discourses, 

 book II, ch. xvii., Higgmson, p. 151), where the student, who has 

 learned to desire nothing but freedom from passion and trouble, is 

 said to have passed through the first class in philosophy, whence 

 he enters the second class in his desire to know his duties to for- 

 eigners, his country, his parents and the Gods. Thus the first de- 

 gree in Stoicism was to make one's self hvppv, and the second to 

 be useful to others; which second and higher degree is that mainly 

 d.velt on by Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, as has been already 

 shown. 



The Tusculan Disputations and De Finibus of Cicero state at 

 some length, that the Stoics agreed with the Peripatetics, Epicu- 

 reans and other acknowledged Utilitarians, in honoring happiness 

 as the greatest good and highest aim of man, and differed from 

 them mainly in declaring that the sole and sufficient means of ac- 

 quiring it v/as virtue, or, in other words, both active and submis- 

 sive obedience to the commands, prohibitions and decrees of nature, 

 their favorite watchword being *' sustine et ahstiney 



The peculiar bitterness of the controversy between the Stoics and 

 Epicureans was partly due to the attempts made by the latter, to 

 overthrow the established opinions about theology, politics and 

 metaphysics, and partly to their assertions, that pleasure was not 

 onl}'' the means but the synonyme of happiness, that the virtues are 

 chosen for the sake of pleasure and not on their own account.* 



It does not appear from Lucretius, Diogenes Laertius, or Cicero, 

 that regard to any happiness but our own Vi^as ever inculcated by 

 the Epicureans, and it is certain that they committed the danger- 

 ous error of using Greek and Latin terms for pleasure which have 

 an extremely sensual signification, hedone being rightly trans- 

 lated lust in our New Testament, (Titus III, 3, James lY, 13,) 

 and Toliiptashamg used in a sense even grosser than that of our 

 derivative voluptuous. Mr. J. S. Mill does not "consider the Epicu- 

 reans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their 

 scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle" (Utilitarian- 

 ism p. 11;) Professor Bain " cannot but remark that the title or for- 

 mula of the theorj'' was ill chosen, and was really a misnomer," 



*See Diogenes Laertius, p. 470 — 3. 



