Acceptance

Traditional Stoics accept what they cannot change, that is, they don't try to change it. They may be too quick to conclude that the universe as a whole and in parts is wholly and particularly beyond reach.

Traditional religionists And some philosophers accept what they consider divine will, though it transcend human understanding. They concede, on faith or first principles, that all must be for the best in the end. Case in point: Voltaire's Pangloss, a transparent gloss on Leibniz, accepting the devastation of mayhem, torture, the Lisbon earthquake…

Stoic pragmatists, though, are meliorists. They heartily accept the challenge of changing what they can for the better, accepting what they must in the end, but never in the long interim of human history presuming that suffering and injustice must subserve the best of possible worlds.

I'd like to think Margaret Fuller was that kind of philosopher, enthusiastically assenting to life as that kind of challenge.

""I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission—as Carlyle would have us—" Gad! we'd better!"—or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent?"

— The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James(Annotated)