very unlike any lower development of temper, in its stress and
earnestness, its serious application to the pursuit of a very
unworldly type of perfection. The saint, and the Cyrenaic lover of
beauty, it may be thought, would at least understand each other
better than either would understand the mere man of the world. Carry
their respective positions a point further, shift the terms a little,
and they might actually touch.

Perhaps all theories of practice tend, as they rise to their best, as
understood by their worthiest representatives, to identification with
each other. For the variety of men's possible reflections on their
experience, as of that experience itself, is not really so great as
it seems; and as the highest and most disinterested ethical formulae,
filtering down into men's everyday existence, reach the same poor
level of vulgar egotism, so, we may fairly suppose that all the
highest spirits, from [21] whatever contrasted points they have
started, would yet be found to entertain, in the moral consciousness
realised by themselves, much the same kind of mental company; to
hold, far more than might be thought probable, at first sight, the
same personal types of character, and even the same artistic and
literary types, in esteem or aversion; to convey, all of them alike,
the same savour of unworldliness. And Cyrenaicism or Epicureanism
too, new or old, may be noticed, in proportion to the completeness of
its development, to approach, as to the nobler form of Cynicism, so
also to the more nobly developed phases of the old, or traditional
morality. In the gravity of its conception of life, in its pursuit
after nothing less than a perfection, in its apprehension of the
value of time--the passion and the seriousness which are like a
consecration--la passion et le serieux qui consacrent--it may be
conceived, as regards its main drift, to be not so much opposed to