io8 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



and with each feature modified by confluence with 

 another character, if by nothing else, the character 

 passes on to its incarnation in new bodies. 



Only one rule of conduct could be based upon the 

 remarkable theory of which I have endeavoured to 

 give a reasoned outline. It was folly to continue to 

 exist when an overplus of pain was certain ; and the 

 probabilities in favour of the increase of misery with 

 the prolongation of existence, were so overwhelming. 

 Slaying the body only made matters worse ; there 

 was nothing for it but to slay the soul by the voluntary 

 arrest of all its activities. Property, social ties, 

 family affections, common companionship, must be 

 abandoned ; the most natural appetites, even that for 

 food, must be suppressed, or at least minimized ; 

 until all that remained of a man was the impassive, 

 extenuated, mendicant monk, self-hypnotised into 

 cataleptic trances, which the deluded mystic took for 

 foretastes of the final union with Brahma. 



If the cosmos is the effect of an immanent, 

 omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent cause, the ex- 

 istence in it of real evil, still less of necessarily 

 inherent evil, is plainly inadmissible. Yet the 

 universal experience of mankind testified then, as 

 now, that, whether we look within us or without us, 

 evil stares us in the face on all sides ; that if anything 

 is real, pain and sorrow and wrong are realities. 



It would be a new thing in history if a priori philo- 

 sophers were daunted by the factious opposition of 

 experience ; and the Stoics were the last men to 



