This is manifestly the Hobbian view of the natural state of man, thought out long before Hobbes, not to mention the naturalists of our own day. And it was not theory only, but practice. Turn to Thucydides's _History of the Peloponnesian War_, which Hobbes translated, and from which, though this is not generally known, Hobbes borrowed the principles that stirred up the seventeenth century as Nietzsche troubled the nineteenth. Read there the famous debate between the envoys of Athens and the magistrates of Melos. The Athenians are advising the Melians, whose racial affinity was with Sparta, to submit their city to the empire of Athens; and to the Melians' argument from justice they reply with cold-blooded candor: "We tell you this, that we are here now both to enlarge our own dominions and also to confer about the saving of your city...." "But will you not accept?" plead the Melians, "that we remain quiet, and be your friends (whereas before we were your enemies), and take part with neither." "No," reply the Athenians, "for your enmity doth not so much hurt us as your friendship would be an argument of our weakness, and your hatred of our power, amongst those whom we bear rule over.... As for the favor of the gods, we expect to have it as well as you; for we neither do nor require anything contrary to what mankind hath decreed either concerning the worship of the gods or concerning themselves. For of the gods we think according to the common opinion; and of men that for certain, by necessity of nature, they will everywhere reign over such as they be too strong for. Neither did we make this law, nor are we the first that use it made, but as we found it, and shall leave it to posterity forever, so also we use it." Such was the philosophy of the natural man in ancient Greece, and such is the philosophy of the natural man to-day, however it may be disguised and glossed over; it is based on the instinctive motive of _pleonexia_, the "perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." I need not dwell on the kind of discontent it begets in the soul, a discontent intrinsically and totally opposite to that which accompanies the purely religious motive.