If it is possible for any man, it was
not, certainly, possible for a Greek, to feel himself connected by any
real bonds with his fellow-creatures around him, while he felt himself
utterly separated from any being above his fellow-creatures. But the
sense of that isolation would affect different minds very differently.
It drove the Epicurean to consider how he might make a world in which he
should live comfortably, without distracting visions of the past and
future, and the dread of those upper powers who no longer awakened in
him any feelings of sympathy. It drove Zeno the Stoic to consider
whether a man may not find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what
is beyond him be ever so unfriendly. . . . We may trace in the
productions which are attributed to Zone a very clear indication of the
feeling which was at work in his mind. He undertook, for instance,
among other tasks, to answer Plato's 'Republic.' The truth that a man
is a political being, which informs and pervades that book, was one
which must have been particularly harassing to his mind, and which he
felt must be got rid of, before he could hope to assert his doctrine of
a man's solitary dignity."
Woe to the nation or the society in which this individualising and
separating process is going on in the human mind! Whether it take the
form of a religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the sign and the
cause of senility, decay, and death.
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