But this, you will say, is nothing to the purpose, so long as both sides are agreed, that there can be no happiness without _virtue_: “Take away that,” says Epicurus, “and I am as little a friend to pleasure as you.” The pinch, in short, is this, whether virtue itself be the supreme good or the only cause of it? It is not the inverting of the order that will clear this point; (though it is a very preposterous error, to set that first which should be last.) It does not half so much offend me; ranging of pleasure before virtue, as the very comparing of them; and the bringing of the two opposites, and professed enemies, into any sort of competition.