Nor can we claim to have chanced upon a discovery of Columbian novelty. The ancients held to this ancient truth. It is a truth more constant than the North Star, more dependable than the speed of light. Aristotle arrives at it by a process of elimination. Every pursuit, he begins, aims at an object other than itself. All but the miser would find in wealth a cul-de-sac for their desires; and even the niggard's esoteric ecstasy is not altogether so perverse as to be wholly unintelligible to, say, a mother basking in the waxing manhood of her child. Every object, then, is an instrument seized to complete another object; happiness alone is desired for itself, never for something other than itself.
In happiness we reach the ultima Thule of human endeavour. But wait! We hear dissenting voices. A chorus of protest tells us that happiness cannot be snatched out of thin air, that even the Ultimate must rest on material foundations. Certainly, we would say, the happiness-on-an-empty-stomach theory cannot pass muster; nor can the no-roof-over-the-head-happiness - hippy happiness - be sustained without a goodly supply of hasheesh. But the hippy makes a point by exaggerating it.
Their forebears were the Cynics. (It is always a good strategy in philosophical debate to locate your champions in hoary antiquity. You are at least saved from the charge of newfangledness. And where the hippies have once been mentioned it is politic to choose a witness whose historic fossils nearly require carbon-dating.) The Cynics were the disciples of Diogenes - and we all know that the only thing that Alexander, the most powerful man in Europe, had to offer the mendicant in his bath-tub residence was the sunshine his ample figure was obstructing. Indeed, both guru and disciples earned their sobriquet from cynikos., Greek for dog-like. They were dog-like in their shamelessness, in their simplicity, in their insolence. They were, in short, the Hellenic hippies.
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