Respecting Diogenes and the Cynic philosophers generally, we have to regard not merely their doctrines, but the effect produced by their severity of life. In this point Diogenes surpassed his master Antisthenes, whose life he criticised as not fully realising the lofty spirit of his doctrine. The spectacle of man not merely abstaining from enjoyment, but enduring with indifference hunger, thirst, heat, cold, poverty, privation, bodily torture, death, &c., exercises a powerful influence on the imagination of mankind. It calls forth strong feelings of reverence and admiration in the beholders: while in the sufferer himself also, self-reverence and self-admiration, the sense of power and exaltation above the measure of humanity, is largely developed. The extent to which self-inflicted hardships and pains have prevailed in various regions of the earth, the long-protracted and invincible resolution with which they have been endured, and the veneration which such practices have procured for the ascetics who submitted to them are among the most remarkable chapters in history.[110] The East, especially India, has always been, and still is, the country in which these voluntary endurances have reached their extreme pitch of severity; even surpassing those of the Christian monks in Egypt and Syria, during the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era.[111] When Alexander the Great first opened India to the observation of Greeks, one of the novelties which most surprised him and his followers was, the sight of the Gymnosophists or naked philosophers. These men were found lying on the ground, either totally uncovered or with nothing but a cloth round the loins; abstaining from all enjoyment, nourishing themselves upon a minimum of coarse vegetables or fruits, careless of the extreme heat of the plain, and the extreme cold of the mountain; and often superadding pain, fatigue, or prolonged and distressing uniformity of posture. They passed their time either in silent meditation or in discourse on religion and philosophy: they were venerated as well as consulted by every one, censuring even the most powerful persons in the land. Their fixed idea was to stand as examples to all, of endurance, insensibility, submission only to the indispensable necessities of nature, and freedom from all other fear or authority. They acted out the doctrine, which Plato so eloquently preaches under the name of Sokrates in the Phædon--That the whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death: that life is worthless, and death an escape from it into a better state.[112] It is an interesting fact to learn that when Onesikritus (one of Alexander's officers, who had known and frequented the society of Diogenes in Greece), being despatched during the Macedonian march through India for the purpose of communicating with these Gymnosophists, saw their manner of life and conversed with them he immediately compared them with Diogenes,