absolutely
disengaged mind. America is here and now--here, or nowhere: as Wilhelm
Meister finds out one day, just not too late, after so long looking
vaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the development of his
capacities. It was as if, recognising in perpetual motion the law of
nature, Marius identified his own way of life cordially with it,
"throwing himself into the stream," so to speak. He too must maintain
a harmony with that soul of motion in things, by constantly renewed
mobility of character.

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res.--

[140] Thus Horace had summed up that perfect manner in the reception of
life attained by his old Cyrenaic master; and the first practical
consequence of the metaphysic which lay behind that perfect manner, had
been a strict limitation, almost the renunciation, of metaphysical
enquiry itself. Metaphysic--that art, as it has so often proved, in
the words of Michelet, de s'egarer avec methode, of bewildering oneself
methodically:--one must spend little time upon that! In the school of
Cyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness, logical and physical
speculation, theoretic interests generally, had been valued only so far
as they served to give a groundwork, an intellectual justification, to
that exclusive concern with practical ethics which was a note of the
Cyrenaic philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic, how true to itself,
under how many varieties of character, had been the effort of the
Greeks after Theory--Theoria--that vision of a wholly reasonable world,
which, according to the greatest of them, literally makes man like God:
how loyally they had still persisted in the quest after that, in spite
of how many disappointments! In the Gospel of Saint John, perhaps,
some of them might have found the kind of vision they were seeking for;
but not in "doubtful disputations" concerning "being" and "not being,"
knowledge and appearance. Men's minds, even young men's minds, at that
late day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which
[141] had so far outrun positive knowledge; and in the mind of Marius,
as in that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui, combined with
appetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort of
suicide (instances of the like have been seen since) by which a great
metaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving metaphysical
speculation impossible, or useless. Abstract theory was to be valued