Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 213

in self and in the present time. It reduced all virtue, to use the expressive words of a modern writer, to a kind of majestic egoism.' Even where Stoicism appeared to rise beyond all the ends of the present, there remained in reality the same relationship of consciousness to these ends when it seemed to rise superior to them. As death in all the systems was either avowedly or practically regarded as the end of all things—any belief to the contrary being scarcely more than a sentiment exercising no practical influence in relation to existing standards of conduct—so the Stoical doctrine of the legitimacy of suicide in presence of misfortune is, in reality, to be rightly regarded as the culminating feature of the ancient philosophy.” It indeed represented the last supreme effort of the human mind to preserve the sense of its own equilibrium and sufficiency in the self-centred present. For it contained the only certain refuge against despair and extreme suffering. ‘Remember,’ said Epictetus, “Gf suffering be not worth your while, the door is open.” * ‘Every man’s life,” said Marcus Aurelius, “lies all within the present,’* and “if the room smoke | leave it, and there is the end.” *® Notwithstanding, in short, all outward changes which took place in the later stages of the higher philosophy of Greece and Rome, in the one fundamental principle which underlay the entire political, social, and moral life of the civilisation they represented, there was no change. That characteristic conception of the ancient world, of an equilibrium between virtue

1 Lecky’s History of European Morals, vol. i. p. 191. 2 [bid. p. 222. 8 Discourses, ii. i. 3. 4 Meditations, iii. x. ; see also ii. xiv.; and viii. xxv. 5 Tid. v.