consequence, for ever.

This over-accentuation in the past of man's egoistic individuality, or,
if one puts it in another way, this unsuspicious ignorance of the real
nature of life, becomes glaringly conspicuous in such weighed and
deliberate utterances as _The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_.
Throughout these frank and fundamental discourses one traces a
predominant desire for a perfected inconsequent egotism. Body is
repudiated as a garment, position is an accident, the past that made us
exists not since it is past, the future exists not for we shall never
see it; at last nothing but the abstracted ego remains,--a sort of
complimentary Nirvana. One citation will serve to show the colour of
all his thought. "A man," he remarks, "is very devout to prevent the
loss of his son. But I would have you pray rather against the fear of
losing him. Let this be the rule for your devotions." [Footnote: _The
Meditations of M. A. Antoninus_, ix. 40.] That indeed is the rule
for all the devotions of that departing generation of wisdom. Rather
serenity and dignity than good ensuing. Rather a virtuous man than any
resultant whatever from his lifetime, for the future of the world. It
points this disregard of the sequence of life and birth in favour of an
abstract and fruitless virtue, it points it indeed with a barbed point
that the son of Marcus Aurelius was the unspeakable Commodus, and that
the Roman Empire fell from the temporizing detachment of his rule into
a century of disorder and misery.

To the thoughtful reader to whom these papers appeal, to the reader
whose mind is of the modern cast, who has surveyed the vistas of the
geological record and grasped the secular unfolding of the scheme of
life, who has found with microscope and scalpel that the same rhythm of
birth and re-birth is woven into the minutest texture of things that