How sane and wholesome, how wisely adapted to the fundamental facts of life, is the Stoic ideal as compared with the monastic! In it we see that there is a place in a natural ethics for a rational asceticism. Of such there will always be need—we must admit, whatever we may think of the ‘spirituality’ of self-destruction, that there are, and are always likely to be, many more men and women who deteriorate in soul and body through petty acts of self-indulgence than who do so by an excess of austerity. And this makes it all the more necessary that the matter should be conceived rightly, reasonably, from the side of a reverence for life and its manifestations, not from that of disdain and repulsion; that we should take hold of it (to quote Epictetus again) by the handle by which it can be carried, not that by which theory and experience alike have shown that it never can. When Tennyson wrote “Move upward, working out the beast,” he was not so well inspired as in some of his other appreciations of modern science. The religious ascetic aims at working out the beast—not so Nature, who does not progress by substituting one form of living for another, but by growing from a central core and continually harmonizing the old radical elements of being with the new assimilations. One _can_, perhaps, work out the beast—what cannot the will achieve? But the beast surely avenges himself, and often in terrible fashion. When, however, we have recognized the false sanction and the false ideal associated with it, we have still the more difficult problem of establishing the true. If Righteousness—to use that term for all kinds of action ethically right—is to be followed in the interests of life, how can it ever be required that much suffering, and even death itself may have to be faced for its sake? Man is a part of a Whole—in the effective realization of that conception all ethics is summed up—but he is also an individual. Why should the individual give way to the Whole if their interests seem to clash? In other words, though we have the contents, the static significance of the word ‘ought,’ we have still to find its dynamic significance, its cogency. Every beast does what it ‘ought’ without any question, and this constantly involves acts of co-operation or self-sacrifice for the interests of the race. In man, ethical action has a greater value for life, simply because, unlike the beast, he is able to question its grounds and to forgo it if he chooses. He observes, as we have said, that the ‘long run’ or universal point of view is often in conflict with the individual point of view. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” is the extreme expression of the individual point of view. It has been called a ‘pig-philosophy,’ and if the expression is just, it is not because the pig will die to-morrow, for it will probably live as long as anything else, but because no matter how long it lives it is, _qua_ pig, incapable of any other form of life.