mediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in
conforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for itself;
and actually, though but with so faint hope, does the "Father's
business."

In that age of Marcus Aurelius, so completely disabused of the
metaphysical ambition to pass beyond "the flaming ramparts of the
world," but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation of
intellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all varieties
of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works, the thoughts of
Marius did but follow the line taken by the majority of educated
persons, though to a different issue. Pitched to a really high and
serious key, the precept--Be perfect in regard to what is here and now:
the precept of "culture," as it is called, or of a complete
education--might at least save him from the vulgarity and heaviness
[146] of a generation, certainly of no general fineness of temper,
though with a material well-being abundant enough. Conceded that what
is secure in our existence is but the sharp apex of the present moment
between two hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our
experience but a series of fleeting impressions:--so Marius continued
the sceptical argument he had condensed, as the matter to hold by, from
his various philosophical reading:--given, that we are never to get
beyond the walls of the closely shut cell of one's own personality;
that the ideas we are somehow impelled to form of an outer world, and
of other minds akin to our own, are, it may be, but a day-dream, and
the thought of any world beyond, a day-dream perhaps idler still: then,
he, at least, in whom those fleeting impressions--faces, voices,
material sunshine--were very real and imperious, might well set himself
to the consideration, how such actual moments as they passed might be
made to yield their utmost, by the most dexterous training of capacity.
Amid abstract metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only
beyond that experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism or
earthliness of human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous
world, let him at least make the most of what was "here and now." In
the actual dimness of ways from means to ends--ends in themselves
desirable, yet for the most part distant and for him, certainly, below
the [147] visible horizon--he would at all events be sure that the
means, to use the well-worn terminology, should ha