FORE:Let none suppose that the foregoing remarks are meant either to express any sympathy with a cowardly shrinking from death, or to intimate that the doctrine of evolution tends to reverse the noblest lessons of ancient wisdom. In holding that death is rightly regarded as an evil, and that it must always continue to be so regarded, we do not imply that it is necessarily the greatest of all evils for any given individual. It is not, as Spinoza has shown, by arguing away our emotions, but by confronting them with still stronger emotions, that they are, if necessary, to be overcome.182 The social feelings may be trusted to conquer the instinct of self-preservation, and, by a self-acting adjustment, to work with more intensity in proportion to the strength of its resistance. The dearer95 our lives are to us, the greater will be the glory of renouncing them, that others may be better secured in the enjoyment of theirs. Aristotle is much truer, as well as more human, than Epicurus, when he observes that the more completely virtuous and happy a man is, the more will he be grieved to die; for to such a one life is worth most, and he will consciously be renouncing the greatest goods, and that is grievous. Nevertheless, he remains brave, nay, even the braver for that very reason, because he prefers the glory of a warrior to every other good.183 Nor need we fear that a race of cowards will be the fittest to survive, when we remember what an advantage that state has in the struggle for existence, the lives of whose citizens are most unrestrictedly held at its disposal. But their devotion would be without merit and without meaning, were not the loss of existence felt to be an evil, and its prolongation cherished as a gain.While the analysis of Hobbes goes much deeper than Aristotles, the grasp of his reconstructive synthesis is wider and stronger in at least an equal proportion. Recognising the good of the whole as the supreme rule of conduct,555 he gives a new interpretation to the particular virtues, and disposes of the theory which made them a mean between two extremes no less effectually than his contemporaries had disposed of the same theory in its application to the elementary constitution of matter. And just as they were aided in their revolt against Aristotle by the revival of other Greek systems, so also was he. The identification of justice with public interest, though commonly attributed to Epicurus alone, was, like materialism, an idea shared by him with Stoicism, and was probably impressed on modern thought by the weight of their united authority. And when we find the philosopher of Malmesbury making public happiness consist in order and tranquillity, we cannot but think that this was a generalisation from the Stoic and Epicurean conceptions of individual happiness; for it reproduces, under a social form, the same ideal of passionless repose.
