Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/622

616 unknown to the multitude except in its effects, why has he not the right to use it?—to use it first of all to enhance his authority and to draw from such authority the advantages that seem to him most desirable? We may well admit that a man of this stamp may have had an inward feeling akin to what we call conscience that would justify his attitude toward Ms fellows—yet he did not consider these Romans fellow men of his—but it was wholly of the intellect. Such a man is as much a philosopher as were the sophists of an earlier age, and, we may add, of our own day. They apprehend clearly certain superficial verities, but cease to inquire farther after they have discovered what they think needful and sufficient for their own aggrandizement. Far different was the class of witches, one of whom is introduced in the same novel. Against these Horace frequently raises his voice, as do also others of the rationalizing Romans. They are ignorant, and, in most instances, as much the dupes of their own juggleries as their victims. Every man who goes through the world with his mind alert can see specimens without especially looking for them. It is doubtful whether any man has ever lived who had not at least a modicum of superstition in him. However much we may know and however far we may be able to pry into nature in some directions, there are others in which our vision is barred and the unknown is literally within arm's length. The mystery of life and death has always been so profound, as it still is though in a different way, that we need not wonder at the strange aberrations which so many persons fell into, who were in most matters little likely to be carried away by delusions. Sleep, 'the twin brother of death,' has from time out of mind been regarded as an excursion into the realm of departed spirits. If, as many believe, our consciousness is never coextensive with our personality, there are yet many discoveries to be made not dreamt of in the philosophy of most of us. Our will as an integral part of ourselves is the resultant of so many forces and, with the majority, is so little under control of rational motives, that it often plays fantastic tricks, not before high heaven alone, but almost anywhere.

The will of each individual as modified, at least in action from moment to moment, is like a ball thrown into a grove. It strikes one tree, then another and another, and no one can predict with certainty where it will come to rest. This element of chance, of Tyche, in the affairs of men, this incalculable calculus of probabilities, pervades in a remarkable degree the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. It made many feel that, do what they would, they were doomed to be thwarted in their plans. It was only those who, like Socrates, Epictetus and a few others, maintained that the chief end of man is to be found in motives rather than in outward results, who were never thrown out of their philosophical poise by the strange vicissitudes of life.