change the figure) without a clearly-disclosed goal of truth towards which they could be seen to tend and converge, they could not maintain or justify themselves: 'the carnal mind' was against them and unworthy of them: as regards any real adoption of them by mankind for fruitful and trustworthy convictions, they passed away, according to that law of which the modern poet speaks:-- Eternal hopes are man's Which when they should maintain themselves aloft Want due consistence: like a pillar of smoke That with majestic energy from earth Rises but, having reached the thinner air, Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen[164]. We shall not be wrong in saying that the course of philosophy after Aristotle displayed increasingly the collapse of the experiment of speculative self-reliance. Scepticism was not confined to the 'Sceptics,' nor even shared only by the Epicureans: it deeply underlay the philosophy of the Stoics. But as with advancing life men baffled in their early sanguineness fall back (both for good and evil) and content themselves with the energies of practical life, so the mind of that day baffled and despairing of the speculative problem did not abandon, but transferred, its self-reliance; men threw themselves with a sort of defiance into the organization of conduct; 'imperturbableness' and 'self-sufficiency' became watchwords of their thought[165]. This is the character of Stoicism: this explains its vogue and wide indirect influence; its curious likeness to its apparently quite alien contemporary, Epicureanism, in a common cultivation of self-sufficingness; and, finally, its ready alliance with the natural tendencies of Roman character when it passed from Greece to Rome.