28 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 



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works through the lower nature of man, not for 

 righteousness, but against it. And it finally drove 

 them to confess that the existence of their ideal " wise 

 man " was incompatible with the nature of things ; 

 that even a passable approximation to that ideal was to 

 be attained only at the cost of renunciation of the 

 world and mortification, not merely of the flesh, but of 

 all human affections. The state of perfection was that 

 ' apatheia ' ( 17 ) in which desire, though it may still be 

 felt, is powerless to move the will, reduced to the 

 sole function of executing the commands of pure 

 reason. Even this residuum of activity was to be 

 regarded as a temporary loan, as an efflux of the 

 divine world-pervading spirit, chafing at its im- 

 prisonment in the flesh, until such time as death 

 enabled it to return to its source in the all-pervading 

 logos. 



I find it difficult to discover any very great differ- 

 ence between Apatheia and Nirvana, except that 

 stoical speculation agrees with pre-Buddhistic philo- 

 sophy, rather than with the teachings of Gautama, 

 in so far as it postulates a permanent substance 

 equivalent to ' Brahma ' and ' Atman ' ; and that, in 

 stoical practice, the adoption of the life of the 

 mendicant cynic was held to be more a counsel of 

 perfection than an indispensable condition of the 

 higher life. 



Thus the extremes touch. Greek thought and 

 Indian thought set out from ground common to 

 both, diverge widely, develope under very different 



