=2. The Highest Good.= What is then the Highest Good or happiness for such a personality? After such an analysis, what would the Stoic be likely to conceive to be the true ends of life? The very nature of the personality gives the answer. Personality is fundamentally rational activity which seeks to preserve itself and to gratify its own nature. The Highest Good is the law of its own rationality, and virtue consists in being rational. In reaching for the Highest Good man can transcend his particular faculties in his free obedience to his own reason; and the wholeness of his existence depends upon the wholeness of his deed. Thus is the inner activity _whole_ in contrast to the partial outer activities. Inwardness attains complete independence and finds the depth of the soul. We are free and we are happy if the whole being goes out in contemplation of the world reason which is our reason, and if all the feelings that make us dependent on the world are excluded. Since the emotions place a false value on things, happiness demands a whole effort and ceaseless activity. We must not merely theorize, but thought must become conduct. Thought-action yields happiness. It does not matter whether man acts with reference to this or that, for external objects are neither good nor bad. The whole question is whether the reason controls the passions or not. If the reason controls, the end is good; if the passions control, the end is evil; all other ends are indifferent. The reason either does or does not rule, and an act is either good or not. Good is not relative, but absolute; and such relative matters as wealth, honor, and riches are matters of indifference. Even life itself is one of the indifferent things and may be taken when it does not serve the ends of reason. The Highest Good is that inner unity――that disposition――which is governed by a single principle. The Stoic word for this ideal Good is apathy, just as the Epicurean word was ataraxy or imperturbability. Positively defined, it is virtue. Negatively defined, can we say it was passionlessness? This would not be quite correct. By apathy the Stoic means not absence of all feeling, but _absence of control by the feelings_. The Stoic was filled with joy, gratitude, serene confidence, and unwavering submission in regard to rational law. Apathy is not dull insensibility, but immovable firmness. It is absence of the emotions that render the man dependent on the world, but it is not absence of the reaching out of the soul for the divine. The Highest Good or Apathy is (1) intellectual resignation to the universe, (2) practical inner harmony, and (3) self-control. In seeking to be rational, man is following an impulse,――the impulse of self-preservation.