He secluded himself in a severe intellectual meditation, becoming something of a mystery to his fellows. He was reading, “for the most part, those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what might be thought concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires.” He studies Heraclitus, and learns to mistrust habitual impressions and uncorrected sensation, and to discern the movement in things of “the sleepless, ever-sustained, inexhaustible energy of the divine reason.” He accepts the canon that the individual must be to himself the measure of all things, and resolves to limit his researches to what immediately interests him, resting peacefully in a profound ignorance of all beside. “He would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow its due weight to this primary element of incertitude or negation, in the conditions of man’s life.” And here he fell under the dominion of Aristippus of Cyrene, who was the first to translate the abstractions of metaphysics into a practical sentiment. He, too, was more than half an agnostic; but instead of his agnosticism leading to a languid enervation, it led rather to a perpetual and inextinguishable thirst for experience. “What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments coming, so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories”; and the practical conclusion he arrived at was that self-culture was probably the best solution, the impulse to “adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touch upon—these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling-places through which the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes and the intercourse of society.” Aristippus, indeed, became to Marius a master of decorous and high-minded living. Metaphysic, as described by Michelet, “the art of bewildering oneself methodically,” he must spend little time upon that. “Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed,” and to acquire this, to regard life as the end of life, the only way was through “insight, through culture, into all that the present moment holds in trust for us, as we stand so briefly in its presence.” The pursuit of vivid sensations and intellectual apprehensions must be his work, until such a manner of life, by its effort to live days “lovely and pleasant,” might become a kind of hidden mystic religion. But there was no touch of hedonism in this:—