The striking and universal success which crowned his work on the Suez Cknal gave him an absoluteness of thought which brooked no contradiction, a despotic temper before which every one must bow, and against which, when he had once taken a resolution, nothing could prevail, not even the most authoritative opposition or the most legitimate entreaties.
God reveals Himself in the logical idea, in nature and in mind; but mind is not alike conscious of its absoluteness in every stage of development.
Its demands were met by the Stoic school which separated the moral from the worldly view of life, with an absoluteness and definiteness that caught the imagination; which regarded practical goodness as the highest manifestation of its ideal of wisdom; and which bound the common notions of duty into an apparently coherent system, by a formula that comprehended the whole of human life, and exhibited its relation to the ordered process of the universe.
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Thus scepticism and relativism are superseded by a historical philosophy, and the absoluteness of truth is affirmed, but the notion of a definite truth is at the same time both negated and satirized.