that cut out in the cameo. Though these living men do not possess arbitrary
power, the advantages of arbitrary power--as far as knowledge is
concerned--are secured to them by education, by the printing-press, and the
facilities of our era. It is reasonable to imagine a head of our time filled
with the largest, the widest, the most profound ideas current in the age.
Augustus Caesar, however great his intellect, could not in that balanced
head have possessed the ideas familiar enough to the living head of this
day. As we have a circle of ideas unknown to Augustus Caesar, so I argue
there are whole circles of ideas unknown to us. It is these that I am so
earnestly desirous of discovering.

For nothing has as yet been of any value, however good its intent. There is
no virtue, or reputed virtue, which has not
been rigidly pursued, and things have remained as before. Men
and women have practised self-denial, and to what end? They
have compelled themselves to suffer hunger and thirst; in
vain. They have clothed themselves in sack cloth and lacerated the flesh.
They have mutilated themselves. Some have been scrupulous to bathe, and some
have been scrupulous to cake their bodies with the foulness of years. Many
have devoted their lives to assist others in sickness or poverty. Chastity
has been faithfully observed, chastity both of body and mind.
Self-examination has been pursued till it ended in a species of sacred
insanity, and all these have been of no more value than the tortures
undergone by the Indian mendicant who hangs himself up by a hook through his
back. All these are pure folly.

Asceticism has not improved the form, or the physical well-being, or the
heart of any human being. On the contrary, the hetaira is often the warmest
hearted and the most generous. Casuistry and self-examination are perhaps
the most injurious of all the virtues, utterly destroying independence of