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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: teaching took so unexpected a form, that the reigning Ptolemy,
apparently Philadelphus, had to interfere with the sacred right of every
man to talk as much nonsense as he likes, and forbade Hegesias to teach
at Alexandria. For Hegesias, a Cyrenaic like Theodorus, but a rather
more morose pedant than that saucy and happy scoffer, having discovered
that the great end of man was to avoid pain, also discovered (his
digestion being probably in a disordered state) that there was so much
more pain than pleasure in the world, as to make it a thoroughly
disagreeable place, of which man was well rid at any price. Whereon he
wrote a book called, [Greek text: apokarteroon], in which a man who had
determined to starve himself, preached the miseries of human life, and
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