[137] The transition involved in passing from "pleasure" to "performance of function" or "life" as the end of conduct, may be illustrated by the following passage from Mr Pater's 'Marius the Epicurean' (1885, i. 163): "Really, to the phase of reflection through which Marius was then passing, the charge of 'hedonism,' whatever its real weight might be, was not properly applicable at all. Not pleasure, but fulness of life, and 'insight' as conducting to that fulness--energy, choice and variety of experience--including noble pain and sorrow even--loves such as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleius; such sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, as Seneca and Epictetus--whatever form of human life, in short, was impassioned and ideal: it was from this that the 'new Cyrenaicism' of Marius took its criterion of values. It was a theory, indeed, which might rightly be regarded as in a great degree coincident with the main principle of the Stoics themselves, and a version of the precept 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might'--a doctrine so widely applicable among the nobler spirits of that time; and as with that its mistaken tendency would lie in the direction of a kind of idolatry of mere life, or natural gift or strength--_l'idolâtrie des talents_." [138] "The note in question greatly startled me by implicitly classing me with anti-utilitarians. I have never regarded myself as an anti-utilitarian."--Mr Spencer's letter to J. S. Mill, printed in Bain's Mental and Moral Science, p. 721. [139] Data of Ethics, p. 173; cf. p. 30. [140] Ibid., pp. 154, 155. [141] Ibid., p. 171. [142] Letter to J. S. Mill, in Data of Ethics, p. 57. [143] Letter to J. S. Mill, in Bain's Mental and Moral Science, p. 721. [144] J. T. Punnet, "Ethical Alternatives"--Mind, x. 95. [145] Science of Ethics, p. 363. [146] Natural Law: An Essay in Ethics (1877), p. 101. [147] Utilitarianism, p. 34. [148] Utilitarianism, p. 26. [149] Ibid., p. 27 n. [150] Stephen, Science of Ethics, p. 385. [151] Ibid., p. 361. [152] Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 14. [153] Simcox, Natural Law, p. 101. CHAPTER VII. HEDONISM AND EVOLUTIONISM. [Sidenote: 1. Alliance of evolutionism and hedonism effected in two ways:] The alliance between Evolutionism and Hedonism may be arrived at from either of the two points of view which are being brought into connection: may be either an attempt to bring the hedonistic end into the definite region of law revealed by the evolution of life; or may result from the endeavour to give clearness and persuasiveness to an ethical end which evolution itself seems to point to. [Sidenote: (_a_) greatest happiness to be obtained by conforming to laws of life or of evolution;]