was in suspicious proximity to, if not in
complicity with, gross scandals and crimes, is equally certain. The
evidence against him is weighty, but by no means conclusive. He may
have lingered in the purlieus of the palace in fond memory of what
Nero had been in the promise of his youth, and in the groundless
hope of bringing him again under more humane influences. This
supposition is rendered the more probable by the well-known fact,
that during his whole court life, and notwithstanding his great
wealth, Seneca's personal habits were almost those of an anchorite.

22 Spinoza's ethical system was closely parallel to that of Hobbes. He
denied the intrinsic difference between right and wrong; but he
regarded _aristocracy_ as the natural order of society. With him, as
with Hobbes, virtue consists solely in obedience to constituted
authority; and so utterly did he ignore a higher law, that he
maintained it to be the right of a state to abjure a treaty with
another state, when its terms ceased to be convenient or profitable.

23 Price's theory of morals is developed with singular precision and
force in one of the Baccalaureate Addresses of the late President
Appleton, of Bowdoin College.

24 {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}.

25 The reader who is conversant with the literature of ethics in
England and America will miss in this chapter many names which merit
a place by the side of those that have been given. But within the
limits proposed for this manual, the alternative was to select a few
writers among those who have largely influenced the thought of their
own and succeeding times, and to associate with each of them
something that should mark his individuality; or to make the chapter
little more than a catalogue of names. The former is evidently the
more judicious course. Nothing has been said of living writers,--not
because there are none who deserve an honored place among the
contributors to this department of science, but because, were the
list to be once opened, we should hardly know where to close it.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MANUAL