ctive force of this motive is altogether
independent of surrounding circumstances, and of all forms of belief. It
is equally true for the man who believes and for the man who rejects the
Christian faith, for the believer in a future world and for the believer
in the mortality of the soul. It is not a question of happiness or
unhappiness, of reward or punishment, but of a generically different
nature. Men feel that a certain course of life is the natural end of
their being, and they feel bound, even at the expense of happiness, to
pursue it. They feel that certain acts are essentially good and noble,
and others essentially base and vile, and this perception leads them to
pursue the one and to avoid the other, irrespective of all
considerations of enjoyment.

The school of philosophy we are reviewing furnishes the most perfect of
all historical examples of the power which the higher of these motives
can exercise over the mind. The coarser forms of self-interest were in
stoicism absolutely condemned. It was one of the first principles of
these philosophers that all things that are not in our power should be
esteemed indifferent; that the object of all mental discipline should be
to withdraw the mind from all the gifts of fortune, and that prudence
must in consequence be altogether excluded from the motives of virtue.
To enforce these principles they continually dilated upon the vanity of
human things, and upon the majesty of the independent mind, and they
indulged, though scarcely more than other sects, in many exaggerations
about the impassive tranquillity of the sage. In the Roman empire
stoicism flourished at a period which, beyond almost any other, seemed
most unfavourable to such teaching. There were reigns when, in the
emphatic words of Tacitus, "virtue was a sentence of death." In no
period had brute force more completely triumphed, in none was the
thirst for material advantages more intense, in very few was vice more
ostentatiously glorified. Yet in the midst of all these circumstances
the Stoics taught a philosophy which was not a compromise, not an
attempt to moderate the popular excesses, but which in its austere
sanctity was the extreme antithesis of all that the prevailing examples
and their own interests could dictate. And these men were no impassioned
fanatics, fired with the prospect of coming glory. They were men from
whose motives of action the belief in the immortality of the soul was
resolutely excluded