This paradox becomes plain, self-evident truth, the moment we admit the Stoic position that not external things, and their appeal to our sensibility, but our internal attitudes toward universal law, are the points on which our virtue hangs. Either we intend to obey the universal law of nature or we do not; and between the intention of obedience and the intention of disobedience there is no middle ground. Second: The wise man, the Stoic sage, is absolutely perfect, the complete master of himself, and rightfully the ruler of the world. If everything depends on our thought, and our thought is in tune with the universal law, then obviously we are perfect. Beyond such complete inner response to the universal law it is impossible for man to advance. Curiously enough, the religious doctrine of perfectionism, which often arises in Methodist circles, and in such holiness movements as have taken their rise from the influence of Methodism, shows this same root in the conception of law. Wesley's definition of sin is "the violation of a known law." If that be all there is of sin, then any of us who is ordinarily decent and conscientious, may boast of perfection. You can number perfectionists by tens of thousands on such abstract terms as these. But if sin be not merely deliberate violation of abstract law; if it be failure to fulfil to the highest degree the infinitely delicate personal, domestic, civic, and social relations in which we stand; then the very notion of perfection is preposterous, and the profession of it little less than blasphemy. But like the modern religious perfectionists, the Stoics had little concern for the concrete, individual, personal ties which bind men and women together in families, societies, and states. Perfection was an easy thing, because they had defined it in such abstract terms. Still, though not by any means the whole of virtue as deeper schools have apprehended it, it is something to have our inner motive absolutely right, when measured by the standard of universal law. That at least the Stoic professed to have attained.