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It does not appear to have been very difficult to become a philosopher amongst the ancients. A moderate store of learning, with a considerable portion of confidence, and just wit enough to produce an occasional apophthegm, seem to have been all the qualifications necessary for the purpose. The principles of moral science were so very imperfectly understood that the founder of a new sect, in forming his ethical code, might consult either fancy or temperament, and adapt it to his own passions and propensities; so that Mahomet, with a little more learning, might have flourished as a philosopher in those days, and would have required but the polish of the schools to become the rival of Aristippus in morality. In the science of nature, too, though some valuable truths were discovered by them, they seemed hardly to know they were truths, or at least were as well satisfied with errors; and Xenophanes, who asserted that the stars were igneous clouds, lighted up every night and extinguished again in the morning, was thought and styled a philosopher, as generally as he who anticipated Newton in developing the arrangement of the universe.

For this opinion of Xenophanes, see Plutarch. de Placit. Philosoph. lib. ii. cap. 13. It is impossible to read this treatise of Plutarch, without alternately admiring the genius, and smiling at the absurdities of the philosophers.

The ancients had their lucernæ cubiculariæ or bedchamber lamps, which, as the Emperor Galienus said, “nil cras meminere;” and, with the same commendation of secrecy, Praxagora addresses her lamp in Aristophanes, Εκκλης. We may judge how fanciful they were, in the use and embellishment of their lamps, from the famous symbolic Lucerna, which we find in the Romanum Museum Mich. Ang. Causei, p. 127.

Hesiod, who tells us in melancholy terms of his father's flight to the wretched village of Ascra. Εργ. και Ημερ. v. 251.

Εννυχιαι στειχον, περικαλλεα οσσαν ιεισαι. Theog. v. 10.

Και μοι σκηπτρον εδον, δαφνης επιθηλεα οζον Id. v. 30.

Π(ειν τα ολα ποταμον δικην, as expressed among the dogmas of Heraclitus the Ephesian, and with the same image by Seneca, in whom we find a beautiful diffusion of the thought. “Nemo est mane, qui fuit pridie. Corpora nostra rapiuntur fluminum more; quidquid vides currit cum tempore. Nihil ex his quæ videmus manet. Ego ipse, dum loquor mutari ipsa, mutatus sum,” &c.

Aristippus considered motion as the principle of happiness, in which idea he differed from the Epicureans, who looked to a state of repose as the only true voluptuousness, and avoided even the too lively agitations of pleasure, as a violent and ungraceful derangement of the senses.

Maupertuis has been still more explicit than this philosopher, in ranking the pleasures of sense above the sublimest pursuits of wisdom. Speaking of the infant man, in his production, he calls him, “une nouvelle créature, qui pourra comprendre les choses les plus sublimes, et ce qui est bien au-dessus, qui pourra gouter les mêmes plaisirs.” See his Vénus Physique. This appears to be one of the efforts at Fontenelle's gallantry of manner, for which the learned President is so well and justly ridiculed in the Akakia of Voltaire.

Maupertuis may be thought to have borrowed from the ancient Aristippus that indiscriminate theory of pleasures which he has set forth in his Essai de Philosophe Morale, and for which he was so very justly condemned. Aristippus, according to Laertius, held μη διαφερειν τε ηδονην ηδονης, which irrational sentiment has been adopted by Maupertuis: “Tant qu on ne considère que l'état présent, tous les plaisirs sont du même genre,” &c. &c.