grain of sincerity is better, in
moral philosophy, than a whole harvest of conventionalities. The
violence and shamelessness of Aristippus were corrected by Epicurus; and
a balance was found between utter despair and utter irresponsibility.
Epicureanism retrenched much: it cut off politics, religion, enterprise,
and passion. These things it convicted of vanity, without stopping to
distinguish in them what might be inordinate from what might be
rational. At the same time it retained friendship, freedom of soul, and
intellectual light. It cultivated unworldliness without superstition
and happiness without illusion. It was tender toward simple and honest
things, scornful and bitter only against pretence and usurpation. It
thus marked a first halting-place in the retreat of reason, a stage
where the soul had thrown off only the higher and more entangling part
of her burden and was willing to live, in somewhat reduced
circumstances, on the remainder. Such a philosophy expresses well the
genuine sentiment of persons, at once mild and emancipated, who find
themselves floating on the ebb-tide of some civilisation, and enjoying
its fruits, without any longer representing the forces that brought that
civilisation about.

[Sidenote: Stoic recourse to conformity.]

The same emancipation, without its mildness, appeared in the Cynics,
whose secret it was to throw off all allegiance and all dependence on
circumstance, and to live entirely on inner strength of mind, on pride
and inflexible humour. The renunciation was far more sweeping than that
of Epicurus, and indeed wellnigh complete; yet the Stoics, in
underpinning the Cynical self-sufficiency with a system of physics,
introduced into the life of the sect a contemplative element which very
much enlarged and ennobled its sympathies. Nature became a sacred
system, the laws of nature being eulogistically called rational laws,
and the necessity of things, because it might be foretold in auguries,
being called providence. There was some intellectual confusion in all
this; but contemplation, even if somewhat idolatrous, has a purifying
effect, and the sad and solemn review of the cosmos to which the Stoic
daily invited his soul, to make it ready to face its destiny, doubtless
liberated it from many an unworthy passion. The impressive spectacle of
things was used to remind the soul of her special and appropriate
function, which was to be rational. This rationality consisted partly in
in