“He supposed his hearer to be, with all sincerity, in search after some principle of conduct (and it was here that he seemed to Marius to be speaking straight to him) which might give unity of motive to an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life, determined partly by natural affection, partly by enlightened self-interest or the feeling of honour, due in part even to the mere fear of penalties.... How tenderly—more tenderly than many stricter souls—he might yield himself to kindly instinct! What fineness of charity in passing judgment on others! What an exquisite conscience of other men’s susceptibilities! He knows for how much the manner, because the heart itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He goes beyond most people in his care for all weakly creatures; judging, instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess rights. He conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call them by that name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in a way of his own.” And then the orator proceeds to sketch a kind of universal commonwealth, a heavenly citizenship, in which all men should realise their position, their duty; and Marius falls to wondering whether there could be any such inner community of humanity, wider than even the community of nationality, and with a larger patriotism, with an aristocracy of elect spirits, an ever-widening example, and a comely order of its own. He realises that his Cyrenaicism is after all but an enthusiasm characteristic of youth, almost a fanaticism, and that something wider, larger, more impersonal is needed, as life goes on. He realised that in his first philosophy there had been “some cramping, narrowing, costly preference of one part of his own nature,” and that he had paid a great price “in the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies” for the intense personal appreciation of the beauty of the moment. It was a narrow perfection that he had been aiming at after all, the perfection of “capacities of feeling, of exquisite physical impressions, of an imaginative sympathy.” But he had rejected the wider, the more venerable system of religious sentiments and ideas, which had grown up in the vast field of human experience. And thus he saw that he could not stay where he was; that he must recognise not only his own personal point of view, but the wider community of humanity.