The object of these
systems was to enable men to endure pain, to repress manifest and
acknowledged desires, to relinquish enjoyments, to establish an absolute
empire over their emotions. On the other hand, there is a method of
education which was never more prevalent than in the present day, which
exhausts its efforts in making virtue attractive, in associating it with
all the charms of imagination and of prosperity, and in thus insensibly
drawing the desires in the wished for direction. As the first system is
especially suited to a disturbed and military society, which requires
and elicits strong efforts of the will, and is therefore the special
sphere of heroic virtues, so the latter belongs naturally to a tranquil
and highly organised civilisation, which is therefore very favourable
to the amiable qualities, and it is probable that as civilisation
advances, the heroic type will, in consequence, become more and more
rare, and a kind of self-indulgent goodness more common. The
circumstances of the ancient societies led them to the former type, of
which the Stoics furnished the extreme expression in their doctrine that
the affections are of the nature of a disease--a doctrine which they
justified by the same kind of arguments as those which are now often
employed by metaphysicians to prove that love, anger and the like, can
only be ascribed by a figure of speech to the Deity.
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