But man is not, and never can be, pure spirit.  He may “let the ape and tiger die,” but he must always retain the animal with its natural appetites.  Moreover, his higher mental capacities increase their power.  Memory recalls past gratifications as it never does to the animal; imagination paints before him vivid pictures of similar future enjoyments, and mental keenness and strength of will tell him that they can all be his.  But if he yields himself a slave to these appetites, if he seeks to be an animal rather than a spiritual being, he becomes not an animal but a brute; and the only genuine brute is a degenerate man.  And thus after conquering the world man’s very structure compels him to join battle with himself.  For here, as everywhere else, to attempt to go backward to a plane of life once passed is to surely degenerate.  The time when the prize of pre-eminence could be won by mere physical superiority was passed before man had a history.  Physical superiority must be maintained, and every advance in art and science, considered here as ministering to man’s physical comfort, is advantageous just so far as these allow man freedom and aid to pursue the mental and moral line which is the only true path left open to him.  But when even these are allowed to minister only to the animal, or to tempt to luxurious ease and indifference to any higher aims, in a word, in so far as they fail to minister to mental and moral advancement, they are in great danger of becoming, if they have not already become, a curse rather than a blessing.  And we all know that this has been proven over and over again in human history.  Families, cities, and nations rot, mainly because they cannot resist the seductions of an overwhelming material prosperity.  A man says to his soul, “Take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry,” and to that man scripture and science say, with equal emphasis, “Thou fool!”

Every upward step in attainment of the comforts of life, of art and science, brings man into new fields not of careless enjoyment but of struggle.  They swarm with new enemies and temptations before unknown.  The new attainments are not unalloyed blessings, they are merely opportunities for victory or defeat.  The uncertain battle is only shifted to a little higher plane.  Man has increased the forces at his command only to meet stronger opposing hosts.  And retreat is impossible.  Man remains a spiritual being only on condition that he resolutely and vigilantly purposes to be so.  To lag behind in this spiritual path is death.

And the epitaph of nations and individuals is the record of their defeat in this struggle to be masters and not slaves of their material and intellectual attainments.  Greece, the most intellectual of all nations of all times, died in mental senility of moral paralysis.  Of Socrates’s and Plato’s “following after truth” nothing remained but the gossipy curiosity of a second childhood, living only to tell or to hear some new thing.  And the schools of philosophy were closed because they had nothing to tell which was worth the knowing or hearing.  All the wealth of the world was poured into Rome, the home of Stoic philosophy, and it was smothered, and died in rottenness under its material prosperity.