Even the Stoic attitude and manly virtue amounts only to this,--that one must maintain and assert himself against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics (their only science, since they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it should behave toward the world, and of nature [physics] only this, that the wise man must assert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the spirit, but only a doctrine of the repelling of the world and of self-assertion against the world. And this consists in "imperturbability and equanimity of life," and so in the most explicit Roman virtue. The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, etc.) went no further than this _practical philosophy_. The _comfort (hedone)_ of the Epicureans is the same _practical philosophy_ the Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another _behavior_ toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd attitude toward the world; the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy. The break with the world is completely carried through by the Skeptics. My entire relation to the world is "worthless and truthless." Timon says, "The feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no truth." "What is truth?" cries Pilate. According to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, etc., but these are _predicates_ which I give it. Timon says that "in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man only _thinks_ of it thus or thus"; to face the world only _ataraxia_ (unmovedness) and _aphasia_ (speechlessness--or, in other words, isolated _inwardness_) are left. There is "no longer any truth to be recognized" in the world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without distinction (good and bad are all the same, so that what one calls good another finds bad); here the recognition of "truth" is at an end, and only the _man without power of recognition_, the _man_ who finds in the world nothing to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world where it is and takes no account of it. So antiquity gets trough with the _world of things_, the order of the world, the world as a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man sees himself placed by nature, _e. g._ the family, the community,--in short, the so-called "natural bonds." With the _world of the spirit_ Christianity then begins. The man who still faces the world _armed_ is the ancient, the--_heathen_ (to which class the Jew, too, as non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to be led by nothing but his "heart's pleasure," the interest he takes, his fellow-feeling, his--_spirit_, is the modern, the--Christian.