no APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute sub- 

 mission of the will to its behests. It is this which 

 commands all men to love one another, to return good 

 for evil, to regard one another as fellow-citizens of 

 one great state. Indeed, seeing that the progress 

 towards perfection of a civilised state, or polity, 

 depends on the obedience of its members to these 

 commands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure 

 reason the " political " nature. Unfortunately, the 

 sense of the adjective has undergone so much modi- 

 fication that the application of it to that which com- 

 mands the sacrifice of self to the common good would 

 now sound almost grotesque. 



CCXLIX 



The majority of us, I apprehend, profess neither 

 pessimism nor optimism. We hold that the world 

 IS neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably 

 might be ; and, as most of us have reason, now and 

 again, to discover that it can be. Those vvho have 

 failed to experience the joys that make life worth 

 living are, probably, in as small a minority as those 

 who have never known the griefs that rob existence 

 of its savour and turn its richest fruits into mere 

 dust and ashes. 



LCI. 



There is another fallacy which appears to me to 

 pervade the so-called "ethics of evolution." It is 

 the notion that because, on the whole, animals and 

 plants have advanced in perfection of organization by 

 means of the struggle for existence and the con- 

 sequent "survival of the fittest" ; therefore men in 

 society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same 

 process to help them towards perfection. I suspect 



