If asceticism in all its forms were as stupid and cruel as it is now the fashion to think it is, then the traditions of saintliness and of heroism are monstrously misleading. For in the legends of heroes, of sages, of explorers, inventors and discoverers, of pioneers and patriots, there is almost invariably this same underlying theme of sacrifice and unworldliness. They are poor. They live dangerously. By ordinary standards they are extremely uncomfortable. They give up ease, property, pleasure, pride, place, and power to attain things which are transcendent and rare. They live for ends which seem to yield them [p157] no profit, and they are ready to die, if need be, for that which the dead can no longer enjoy. And yet, though there is nothing in our current morality to justify their unworldliness, we continue to admire them greatly. In saying all this I am not trying to clinch an argument by appealing to great names. There is much in the teaching of all the spiritual leaders of the past which is wholly obsolete to-day, and there is no compulsive authority in any part of their teaching. They may have been as mistaken in their insight into the human soul as they usually were in their notions of physics and history. To say, then, that there is an ascetic element in all the great philosophies of the past is not proof that there must be one in modern philosophy. But it creates a presumption, I think, which cannot be ignored, for we must remember that the least perishable part of the literature and thought of the past is that which deals with human nature. Scientific method and historical scholarship have enormously increased our competence in the whole field of physics and history. But for an understanding of human nature we are still very largely dependent, as they were, upon introspection, general observation, and intuition. There has been no revolutionary advance here since the hellenic philosophers. That is why Aristotle’s ethics is still as fresh for anyone who accustoms himself to the idiom as Nietzsche, or Freud, or Bertrand Russell, whereas Aristotle’s physics, his biology, or his zoology is of interest only to antiquarians. It is, then, as an insight into human nature, and not as a rule authoritatively imposed or highly sanctioned by the prestige of great men, that I propose now to inquire what meaning there is for us in the fact that men in the [p158] past have so persistently associated the good life with some form of ascetic discipline and renunciation. The modern world, as it has emancipated itself from its ancestral regime, has assumed almost as a matter of course that the human passions, if thoroughly liberated from all tyrannies and distortions, would by their fulfilment achieve happiness. All those who teach asceticism, deny this major premise of modernity, and the result is that the prevailing philosophy is at odds on the most fundamental of all issues with the wisdom of the past. 3. _The Ascetic Principle_