EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 185 



cosmos had no importance for the conscience, except in so far as 

 he chose to think it a pedagogue to virtue. The pertinacious 

 optimism of our philosophers hid from them the actual state of 

 the case. It prevented them from seeing that cosmic nature is no 

 school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical 

 nature. The logic of facts was necessary to convince them that 

 the cosmos works through the lower nature of man, not for right- 

 eousness, 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 " 

 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 re- 

 garded as a temporary loan as an efflux of the divine, world- 

 pervading spirit, chafing at its imprisonment 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 difference between 

 Apatheia and Nirvana, except that stoical speculation agrees with 



letters, as we possess them, are worthless forgeries is obvious, and writers as wide apart as 

 Baur and Lightfoot agree that the whole story is devoid of foundation. 



The dissertation of the late Bishop of Durham (Lightfoot, Epistle to the Philippians) is 

 particularly worthy of study, apart from this question, on account of the evidence which it 

 supplies of the numerous similarities of thought between Seneca and the writer of the 

 Pauline epistles. When it is remembered that the writer of the Acts puts a quotation from 

 Aratus, or Cleanthes, into the mouth of the apostle, and that Tarsus was a great seat of 

 philosophical and especially stoical learning (Chrysippus himself was a native of the adja- 

 cent town of Soli) there is no difficulty in understanding the origin of these resemblances. 

 See, on this subject, Sir Alexander Grant's dissertation in his edition of The Ethics of 

 Aristotle (where there is an interesting reference to the stoical character of Bishop Butler's 

 ethics), the concluding pages of Dr. Weygoldt's instructive little work, Die Philosophic der 

 Sjoa, and Aubertin's Seneque et Saint Paul. 



It is surprising that a writer of Dr. Lightfoot's stamp should speak of Stoicism as a 

 philosophy of " despair." Surely, rather, it was a philosophy of men who, having cast off 

 all illusions and the childishness of despair among them, were minded to endure in patience 

 whatever conditions the cosmic process might create, so long as those conditions were com- 

 patible with the progress toward virtue, which alone for them conferred a worthy object 

 on existence. There is no note of despair in the stoical declaration that the perfected 

 " wise man " is the equal of Zeus in everything but the duration of his existence. And in 

 my judgment there is as little pride about it often as it serves for the text of discourses 

 on stoical arrogance. Grant the stoical postulate that there is no good except virtue ; grant 

 that the perfected wise man is altogether virtuous, in consequence of being guided in all 

 things by the reason, which is an effluence of Zeus, and there seems no escape from the 

 stoical conclusion. 



* Our " apathy " carries such a different set of connotations from its Greek original that 

 I have ventured on using the latter as a technical term. 



