we should survey with equanimity all pleasures and all pains.  We should never forget that we are freemen, not the slaves of society.  “I possess,” said the Stoic, “a treasure which not all the world can rob me of—­no one can deprive me of death.”  We should remember that Nature in her operations aims at the universal, and never spares individuals, but uses them as means for the accomplishment of her ends.  It is, therefore, for us to submit to Destiny, cultivating, as the things necessary to virtue, knowledge, temperance, fortitude, justice.  We must remember that every thing around us is in mutation; decay follows reproduction, and reproduction decay, and that it is useless to repine at death in a world where every thing is dying.  As a cataract shows from year to year an invariable shape, though the water composing it is perpetually changing, so the aspect of Nature is nothing more than a flow of matter presenting an impermanent form.  The universe, considered as a whole, is unchangeable.  Nothing is eternal but space, atoms, force.  The forms of Nature that we see are essentially transitory, they must all pass away.

Stoicism in the museum.  We must bear in mind that the majority of men are imperfectly educated, and hence we must not needlessly offend the religious ideas of our age.  It is enough for us ourselves to know that, though there is a Supreme Power, there is no Supreme Being.  There is an invisible principle, but not a personal God, to whom it would be not so much blasphemy as absurdity to impute the form, the sentiments, the passions of man.  All revelation is, necessarily, a mere fiction.  That which men call chance is only the effect of an unknown cause.  Even of chances there is a law.  There is no such thing as Providence, for Nature proceeds under irresistible laws, and in this respect the universe is only a vast automatic engine.  The vital force which pervades the world is what the illiterate call God.  The modifications through which all things are running take place in an irresistible way, and hence it may be said that the progress of the world is, under Destiny, like a seed, it can evolve only in a predetermined mode.

The soul of man is a spark of the vital flame, the general vital principle.  Like heat, it passes from one to another, and is finally reabsorbed or reunited in the universal principle from which it came.  Hence we must not expect annihilation, but reunion; and, as the tired man looks forward to the insensibility of sleep, so the philosopher, weary of the world, should look forward to the tranquillity of extinction.  Of these things, however, we should think doubtingly, since the mind can produce no certain knowledge from its internal resources alone.  It is unphilosophical to inquire into first causes; we must deal only with phenomena.  Above all, we must never forget that man cannot ascertain absolute truth, and that the final result of human inquiry into the matter is, that we are incapable of perfect knowledge; that, even if the truth be in our possession, we cannot be sure of it.