into the arena.(1614) The peace and happiness of the early Eden have departed for ever, leaving men to the restlessness of exhausted appetite, or to the half-repentant sense of impotent lives, spent in pursuing the phantoms of imaginary pleasure, with broken glimpses now and then of a world for ever lost.(1615) With such a scene about him in his declining years, whatever his own practice may have been, Seneca came to feel an evangelistic passion, almost approaching S. Paul’s, to open to these sick perishing souls the vision of a higher life through the practical discipline of philosophy. The tendency to regard the true function of philosophy as purely ethical, reforming, guiding and sustaining character and conduct, finds its most emphatic expression in Seneca. He is far more a preacher, a spiritual director, than a thinker, and he would have proudly owned it. His highest, nay, one may almost say his only aim, is, in our modern phrase, to which his own sometimes approaches, to save souls. Philosophy in its highest and best sense is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, nor the disinterested play of intellect, regardless of intellectual consequences, as in a Platonic dialogue.(1616) It is pre-eminently the science or the art of right living, that is of a life conformed to right reason.(1617) Its great end is the production of the _sapiens_, the man who sees, in the light of Eternal Reason, the true proportions of things, whose affections have been trained to obey the higher law, whose will has hardened into an unswerving conformity to it, in all the difficulties of conduct.(1618) And the true philosopher is no longer the cold, detached student of intellectual problems, far removed from the struggles and the miseries of human life. He has become the _generis humani paedagogus_,(1619) the schoolmaster to bring men to the Ideal Man. In comparison with that mission, all the sublimity or subtlety of the great masters of dialectic becomes mere contemptible trifling, as if a man should lose himself in some game, or in the rapture of sweet music, with a great conflagration raging before his eyes. In the universal moral shipwreck, how can one toy with these old world trifles, while the perishing are stretching out their hands for help?(1620) Not that Seneca despises the inheritance of ancient wisdom, so far as it has any gospel for humanity.(1621) He will accept good moral teaching from any quarter, from Plato or Epicurus, as readily as from Chrysippus or Panaetius.(1622) He is ready to give almost divine honours to the great teachers of the human race. But he also feels that no moral teaching can be final. After a thousand ages, there will still be room for making some addition to the message of the past. There will always be a need for fresh adjustments and applications of the remedies which past wisdom has handed down.(1623)