separate truth from error.  He taught the world how to weigh evidence.  He would discard any doctrine which, logically carried out, led to absurdity.  Instead of turning his attention to outward phenomena, he dwelt on the truths which either God or consciousness reveals.  Instead of the creation, he dwelt on the Creator.  It was not the body he cared for so much as the soul.  Not wealth, not power, not the appetites were the true source of pleasure, but the peace and harmony of the soul.  The inquiry should be, not what we shall eat, but how shall we resist temptation; how shall we keep the soul pure; how shall we arrive at virtue; how shall we best serve our country; how shall we best educate our children; how shall we expel worldliness and deceit and lies; how shall we walk with God?—­for there is a God, and there is immortality and eternal justice:  these are the great certitudes of human life, and it is only by these that the soul will expand and be happy forever.

Thus there was a close connection between his philosophy and his ethics.  But it was as a moral teacher that he won his most enduring fame.  The teacher of wisdom became subordinate to the man who lived it.  As a living Christian is nobler than merely an acute theologian, so he who practises virtue is greater than the one who preaches it.  The dissection of the passions is not so difficult as the regulation of the passions.  The moral force of the soul is superior to the utmost grasp of the intellect.  The “Thoughts” of Pascal are all the more read because the religious life of Pascal is known to have been lofty.  Augustine was the oracle of the Middle Ages, from the radiance of his character as much as from the brilliancy and originality of his intellect.  Bernard swayed society more by his sanctity than by his learning.  The useful life of Socrates was devoted not merely to establish the grounds of moral obligation, in opposition to the false and worldly teaching of his day, but to the practice of temperance, disinterestedness, and patriotism.  He found that the ideas of his contemporaries centred in the pleasure of the body:  he would make his body subservient to the welfare of the soul.  No writer of antiquity says so much of the soul as Plato, his chosen disciple, and no other one placed so much value on pure subjective knowledge.  His longings after love were scarcely exceeded by Augustine or St. Theresa,—­not for a divine Spouse, but for the harmony of the soul.  With longings after love were, united longings after immortality, when the mind would revel forever in the contemplation of eternal ideas and the solution of mysteries,—­a sort of Dantean heaven.  Virtue became the foundation of happiness, and almost a synonym for knowledge.  He discoursed on knowledge in its connection with virtue, after the fashion of Solomon in his Proverbs.  Happiness, virtue, knowledge:  this was the Socratic trinity, the three indissolubly connected together, and forming the life of the soul,—­the only