ow equally from the universal order, shall be
declared, in spite of reason, to be equally good. True virtue shall be
reduced to conformity. He who has no ideal but that nature should
possess her actual constitution will be wise and superior to all
flattery and calamity; he will be equal in dignity to Zeus. He who has
any less conformable and more determinate interests will be a fool and a
worm.

The wise man will, meantime, perform all the offices of nature; he will
lend his body and his mind to her predestined labours. For pantheistic
morals, though post-rational, are not ascetic. In dislodging the natural
ideal from the mind, they put in its place not its supernatural
exaggeration but a curtailment of it inspired by despair. The passions
are not renounced on the ground that they impede salvation or some
visionary ecstasy; they are merely chilled by the sense that their
defeat, when actual, is also desirable. As all the gods have been
reduced to one substance or law, so all human treasures are reduced to
one privilege--that of fortitude. You can always consent, and by a
forced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above all
vicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature really
breeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, you
will be too stolid to perceive or too proud to share.

Thus the hereditary taint of mythology, the poison of lies, survived in
the two forms of philosophic paganism which it concerns us to study. In
Plato's school, myth helped to hypostasise the ideas and, by divorcing
them from their natural basis, to deprive them of their significance and
moral function, and render the worship of them superstitious. In the
Stoa the surviving mythological element turned nature, when her unity
and order had been perceived, into an idol; so that the worship of her
blasted all humane and plastic ideals and set men upon a vain and
fanatical self-denial. Both philosophies were post-rational, as befitted
a decadent age and as their rival and heir, Christianity, was also.

[Sidenote: Parallel movements in Christianity.]

Christianity had already within itself a similar duality; being a
doctrine of redemption, like neo-Platonism, it tended to deny the
natural values of this life; but, being a doctrine of creation and
providential government, comparable in a way to the Stoic, it had an
ineradicable inward tendency toward pantheism, and toward a consequent
acceptance of bot