Fourthly, pleasure does not consist in the multiplication of needs and their subsequent satisfaction. The multiplication of wants only renders it more difficult to satisfy them. It complicates life without adding to happiness. We should have as few needs as possible. Epicurus himself lived a simple life, and advised his followers to do the same. The wise man, he said, living on bread and water, could vie with Zeus himself in happiness. Simplicity, cheerfulness, moderation, temperance, are the best means to happiness. The majority of human wants, and the example of the thirst for fame is quoted, are entirely unnecessary and useless. Lastly, the Epicurean ideal, though containing no possibility of an exalted nobility, was yet by no means entirely selfish. A kindly, benevolent temper appeared in these men. It is pleasanter, they said, to do a kindness than to receive one. There is little of the stern stuff of heroes, but there is much that is gentle and lovable, in the amiable moralizings of these butterfly-philosophers. {361} CHAPTER XVII THE SCEPTICS Scepticism is a semi-technical term in philosophy, and means the doctrine which doubts or denies the possibility of knowledge. It is thus destructive of philosophy, since philosophy purports to be a form of knowledge. Scepticism appears and reappears at intervals in the history of thought. We have already met with it among the Sophists. When Gorgias said that, if anything exists, it cannot be known, this was a direct expression of the sceptical spirit. And the Protagorean "Man is the measure of all things" amounts to the same thing, for it implies that man can only know things as they appear to him, and not as they are in themselves. In modern times the most noted sceptic was David Hume, who attempted to show that the most fundamental categories of thought, such as substance and causality, are illusory, and thereby to undermine the fabric of knowledge. Subjectivism usually ends in scepticism. For knowledge is the relation of subject and object, and to lay exclusive emphasis upon one of its terms, the subject, ignoring the object, leads to the denial of the reality of everything except that which appears to the subject. This was so with the Sophists. And now we have the reappearance of a similar {362} phenomenon. The Sceptics, of whom we are about to treat, made their appearance at about the same time as the Stoics and Epicureans. The subjective tendencies of these latter schools find their logical conclusion in the Sceptics. Scepticism makes its appearance usually, but not always, when the spiritual forces of a race are in decay. When its spiritual and intellectual impulses are spent, the spirit flags, grows weary, loses confidence, begins to doubt its power of finding truth; and the despair of truth is scepticism. Pyrrho.