“Where, then, is progress to be looked for? If any one of you, giving up his allegiance to things outside him, has devoted himself entirely to his will—to cultivating and elaborating it so as to make it at last in harmony with nature, lofty, free, unthwarted, unhindered, conscientious, self-respectful: if he has learned that one who longs for or shuns what is not in his power can neither be conscientious nor free, but must be carried along with the changes and gusts of things—must be at the mercy of those who can produce or prevent them: if, moreover, from the moment when he rises in the morning he keeps watch and guard over these qualities of his soul—bathes like a man of honour, eats like a man who respects himself—through all the varying incidents of each successive hour working out his one great purpose, as a runner makes all things help his running, and a singing-master his teaching:—this man is making progress in very truth—this man is one who has not left home in vain. “But if, on the other hand, he is wholly bent upon and labours at what is found in books, and has left home with a view to acquiring that, I tell him to go home again at once, and not neglect whatever business he may have there: for the object which has brought him away from home is a worthless one. This only (is worth anything), to study to banish from one’s life sorrows and lamentations and ‘Alas!’ and ‘Wretched me!’ and misfortune and failure—and to learn what death really is, and exile and imprisonment and the hemlock-draught, so as to be able to say in the prison, ‘My dear Crito, if so it please the gods, so let it be.’” This new or revived conception of philosophy as the science of human conduct, as having for its purpose the actual reformation of mankind, had already led to the view that in the present state of human nature the study and practice of it required special kinds of effort. It was not only the science but also the art of life.[239] It formed, as such, no exception to the rule that all arts require systematic and habitual training. Just as the training of the muscles which is necessary to perfect bodily development is effected by giving them one by one an artificial and for the time an exaggerated exercise, so the training of the moral powers was effected, not by reading the rules and committing them to memory, but by giving them a similarly artificial and exaggerated exercise. A kind of moral gymnastic was necessary. The aim of it was to bring the passions under the control of reason, and to bring the will into harmony with the will of God.