CYNICS. The school of Greek philosophers known as Cynics was founded by Antisthenes of Athens (444-36S B.C.), who in later life became a disciple of Socrates. He founded his new School after the death of Socrates, and taught that as far as possible men should be in dependent of ordinary human needs. His clothing was an old cloak; his bed was the hare earth; his furniture consisted of a sack, a staff, and a bowl. The name Cynic is either derived from Cynosarges, the gymnasium in which Antisthenes taught, or was suggested by the mode of life of the Cynics, which, according to their opponents befitted a dog rather than a man. The Cynics claimed to be the true representatives of the teaching of Socrates, and they made a great impression on the Stoics (see STOICISM). They have been de scribed as a kind of " mendicant order in philosophy." Their doctrines led them to flout and defy the conven tionalities of life, to become self-sufficient and anti-social. They wished men to live in accordance with Nature. " They glorified the state of nature with inexhaustible eloquence and ingenuity, and they never wearied of anathematising the pernicious influence of civilisation " (Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, quoted by W. L. Davidson).
The ideal man of Antisthenes was Diogenes of Sinope. Yet Cynicism at its best has a large element of the finest idealism. Anthisthenes teaches that pleasures of the world are not real pleasures, and that mere money is not real wealth. " You cannot buy uprightness with material coin; but you may be wealthy, though poor and lacking such coin, in spiritual riches. I hold to the belief,' he says, that wealth and poverty lie not in men's estate but in men's souls,' wealth of my sort will make you liberal of nature.' The soul is the great thing, and its health the first concern; and the discourse on this text that he gives is an advocacy of the wisdom, for the soul's sake, of sitting loose to the pleasures of the world, of moderating and suppressing one's desires, of finding the source of happiness and peace in the mind and inward being, not in external circumstances or the so-called good things of life, which are variable and uncertain and which perish in the using, leaving one unsatisfied " (W. L. Davidson). See William L. David son, The Stoic Creed, 1907; C. J. Deter; Max B. Wein stein, and 1910.