Under the Empire Stoicism lost the moderate interest in speculation which it had once had, and became almost exclusively a moral philosophy. It was an age which called for moral resistance, when men were obliged to steel themselves to endure oppression and disaster, to “endure and refrain.” This is the motto of the later Stoics, ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου, by which they meant: “Refrain from all that thy will cannot control; endure all that may assault thee; practise thyself in following the guide of reason; resist all passions.” This is almost the sum total of the discourses of Epictetus. The ancient conflict between body and soul also came to the front once more, and Stoicism showed the same ascetic tendency that is found in all the later philosophies. To it Marcus Aurelius gives clearest expression. Reflecting on his own nature the Emperor quotes a saying of Epictetus: “Thou art a poor soul burdened with a corpse.”[241] Again in self-exhortation he says: “ This thing I am is but flesh, breath, and the guiding reason. Farewell my books! strain after them no more. They are not for thee. As if already in the presence of death, despise thy flesh—it is only foul blood and bones, a web and tissue of sinews and veins and arteries. Consider breath too! What is it? A puff of wind never the same, but every moment exhaled and again inhaled. Last comes the guiding reason—on that set all thy mind.”[242] The Emperor bids his books farewell. Philosophy was no longer a thing for the closet and the scholar’s study, but a matter of practical life in the market place and public square; the unlettered might pursue it as well as the learned, for it was the art of living—an art which the noblest pursued with all the enthusiasm of religious emotion. Although the Stoic was most concerned with the present, and could offer no continued life for the individual soul beyond the time when all the universe should sink back into the original fire, his fervor could be that of the seer with a vision of eternity. The contributions which the Stoics made to the ethical and religious life were large. They showed that there is a moral order in nature to which man as a part of nature must conform; by emphasizing the community of reason between man and God, so that in Epictetus’ phrase we are but fragments of God,[243] they gave a religious sanction to duty toward God and man which had hitherto been lacking; and by the conclusions which they logically drew as to the brotherhood of man, disregarding distinctions of birth, position, or race, and looking to character alone, they gave a great impulse to the improvement of morals, to the spread of justice and kindliness in private relations, and to a genuine love for humanity. The stimulus which a belief in personal immortality might have given them was replaced by a sense of divine kinship and a challenge to the will to choose the nobler course under the guide of reason.