Stoicism

“ Thus Stoicism, whatever its weaknesses, fulfilled the two main demands that man makes upon his religion: it gave him armour when the world was predominantly evil, and it encouraged him forward when the world was predominantly good. ”

“ In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! ”

“ Ah, it is a cold philosophy—you may reconcile yourself to its wisdom in the world, in the hum and shock of men; but in solitude, with Nature—ah, no! While the mind alone is occupied, you may be contented with the pride of stoicism ”

“ Of course we may, if we like, take up a position of pure stoicism, and deny pathos altogether, in life as in art. We may regard all human affairs but as a mere struggle for existence, and say that might makes right, and that the weak is only treated according to his deserts when he goes to the wall. ”

“ But below Stoicism one may not suffer his life to fall, if he would escape the fearful hells of depression, despair, and melancholia. As we lightly send back across the centuries our thanks to Epicurus for teaching us to prize at their true worth health and the good things of life, so let us reverently bow before the Stoic sages, who taught us the secret of that hardy virtue which bears with fortitude life's inevitable ills. ”

“ Thus Stoicism grapples with a difficulty which no religion has satisfactorily solved.
You will have observed that by now we have worked out two quite different types of Stoic—one who defies the world and one who works with the world; and, as in Christianity, both types are equally orthodox. We have first the scorner of all earthly things. Nothing but goodness is good; nothing but badness bad. Pain, pleasure, health, sickness, human friendship and affection, are all indifferent. The truly wise man possesses his soul in peace ”

“ Divine providence, though frequently dwelt upon, signified little more for the Stoic than destiny or fate. Harmony with nature was simply a sense of proud self-sufficiency. Stoicism is the glorification of reason, even to the extent of suppressing all emotion. Sin is unreason, and salvation lies in an external control of the passions—in indifference and apathy begotten of the subordination of desire to reason. ”

“ Thus Stoicism inculcates that rational happiness, the happiness of reason, spiritual felicity, is the great end of man; their happiness is, perfection; that the life of reason, the life according to the spirit, being the life of nature, is the means to this end, and that the rational life is the virtuous life. On the other hand, Epicurism inculcates that sensational happiness, the happiness of the feelings, the satisfaction of the passions, bodily felicity, is the great end of man ”

“ People could indulge flights of either sort of emotion from a central point of stoicism, he would have told you had you asked him, but it would depend altogether upon themselves to what degree they carried them. ”

“ I wish in this lecture to give in rough outline some account of the greatest system of organized thought which the mind of man had built up for itself in the Græco-Roman world before the coming of Christianity with its inspired book and its authoritative revelation. Stoicism may be called either a philosophy or a religion. ”

“ We may seem to have wandered somewhat from the religious aspect of Stoicism, but the digression finds its justification not only in the fact that both the belief in the natural equality of men and the cosmopolitan character of Stoicism grew out of the doctrine that each man’s reason is a part of the universal reason, but also in the significance these things had for that time and for ours. ”

“ Philosophy, which had had its share in the breakdown of faith, beginning in the days of the Punic wars, was now offering out of itself a substitute for the faith which it had taken away. It no longer contented itself with a destructive criticism which resulted in a negative view of life, but in Stoicism at least it strove to provide something sufficiently constructive to afford not only a rule of living but also an inspiration to live. ”

“ There were in Stoicism two serious defects which made it impossible for it to become the guide and rule of life for the multitude. First, it was too intellectually exalted and cold to make appeal to the common people. ”

“ The Epicurean system is even more purely practical in tendency than the Stoic. In spite of the fact that Stoicism subordinates logic and physics to ethics, yet the diligence and care which the Stoics bestowed upon such doctrines as those of the criterion of truth, the nature of the world, the soul, and so on, afford evidence of a genuine, if subordinate, interest in these subjects. ”

“ At this point, if not before, we feel that Stoicism is doing violence to the nobler feelings of our nature, and are prepared to break with it. Stoicism is too hard and cold and individualistic to teach us our duty, or even to leave us free to act out our best inclinations, toward [Pg 77] our neighbour. ”

“ The stoicism of man must surpass our comprehension, if the dramatic scene can be contemplated without emotion; more especially when the representation of life and manners is intended to correct and to enlarge the heart. ”

“ The thought never won universal acceptance even among philosophers; it had only an indirect and slight effect on the Stoicism which was the best religious product of ancient philosophy. But it wrought by degrees all effect on the thinking of mankind. ”

“ Thus everything except a slight residuum is through and through mental, our own product, the expression of what we are and desire to be. The only difference between Stoicism and Christian Science at this point is that Stoicism recognises the material element ”

“ The next point you must help me with— whether you have ever met such a Stoic, such a pattern of Stoicism, as to be unconscious of pain, untempted by pleasure, free from wrath, superior to envy, contemptuous of wealth, and, in one word, Happy; such should the example and model of the Virtuous life be; for any one who falls short in the slightest degree, even though he is better than other men at all points, is not complete, and in that case not yet Happy. ”

“ Accordingly one may also conceive of Stoicism as a spiritual hygiene, in accordance with which, just as one hardens the body against the influences of wind and weather, against fatigue and exertion, one has also to harden one's mind against misfortune, danger, loss, injustice, malice, perfidy, arrogance, and the folly of men. ”

“ And the inner contradiction referred to above, with which the ethical system of Stoicism is affected even in its fundamental thought, shows itself further in the circumstance that its ideal, the Stoic philosopher, as the system itself represents him, could never obtain life or inner poetic truth, but remains a wooden, stiff lay-figure of which nothing can be made. He cannot himself make use of his wisdom, and his perfect peace, contentment, and blessedness directly contradict the nature of man, and preclude us from forming any concrete idea of him. ”

“ Apprentice students of Stoicism are described as messengers, as scouts of God, as representatives of divine nature. The advancing student who is close to the goal of being a philosopher has the rank of an officer. He is already able to establish inner freedom and independence. He understands the basic Stoic truth of subjective consciousness, which is to distinguish what is in our power from what is not in our power. Not in our power are all the elements which constitute our environment, such as wealth, health, reputation, social prestige, power, the lives of those we love, and death. ”

“ Stoicism rapidly developed into a religion, having its rites, obediences, ascetic practices, directors of conscience, examination of conscience, and its adepts with a traditional dress, long cloak, and long beard. ”

“ For the Stoics were notoriously materialists and pantheists of the most extreme character; and while no strict Stoic believed in the eternal duration of the individual soul, some even denied its persistence after death. Yet it is equally certain that of all gentile philosophies, Stoicism exhibits the highest ethical development, is animated by the most religious spirit, and has exerted the profoundest influence upon the moral and religious development not merely of the best men among the Romans, but among the moderns down to our own day. ”

“ The mind is an active process; and the meaning and value of any sensation presented from without is determined by the reaction upon it of the ideas and aims that are dominant within. This doctrine has revolutionised psychology and pedagogy, and when rightly introduced into the personal life proves even more revolutionary there. Stoicism works this doctrine for all that it is worth. Christian Science and kindred popular cults of the present day are perhaps working it for rather more than it is worth. ”

“ Following out this conception the Stoics identified a life in accordance with nature with a life in accordance with the highest perfection to which man could attain. Now, as man was essentially a rational animal, his work as man lay in living the rational life. And the perfection of reason was virtue. Hence the ways of nature were no other than the ways of virtue. And so it came about that the Stoic formula might be expressed in a number of different ways which yet all amounted to the same thing. ”

“ The Stoics are of more importance. Despite the fact that their philosophic interests lay rather in ethics and physics, their activity in what they classified as the third department of speculation was enormous and has at least left ineffaceable traces on the terminology of philosophy. Logic is their The Stoics. word, and consciousness, impression and other technical words come to us, at least as technical words, from Roman Stoicism. Even inference, though apparently not a classical word, throws back to the Stoic name for a conclusion. ”

“ The Stoics tried to treat man as a being of pure reason. The Peripatetics would not shut their eyes to his mixed nature, and contended that the good of such a being must also be mixed, containing in it elements which had reference to the body and its environment. The goods of the soul indeed, they said, far outweighed those of body and estate, but still the latter had a right to be considered. ”

“ Out of the general ideas which nature imparts to us, reason was perfected about the age of fourteen, at the time when the voice—its outward and visible sign—attains its full development, and when the human animal is complete in other respects as being able to reproduce its kind. Thus reason which united us to the gods was not, according to the Stoics, a pre-existent principal, but a gradual development out of sense. It might truly be said that with them the senses were the intellect. ”

“ Virtue having been purified from all the dross of the emotions, came out as something purely intellectual, so that the Stoics agreed with the Socratic conception that virtue is knowledge. They also took on from Plato the four cardinal virtues of Wisdom, Temperance, Courage, and Justice, and defined them as so many branches of knowledge. ”

“ The Stoics, arising when the Greek city life was decaying, contemplated man as an individual, and undertook to show him how to lead a good life. A good life means a 'life according {100} to nature,' or 'according to reason': the reason of the individual being a part of the universal reason or God. And as a help in living according to reason, the Stoics laid stress upon the conscience in each man, i.e. a faculty lying behind his ordinary surface self, passing judgement according to reason upon his actions, and 'making cowards of us all,' inasmuch as we all do wrong. ”

“ The external circumstances, the acts of others, do not touch me, but my own acts, my own relations, my own inner life are things to which I must give all of my attention. So the Stoic reasoned, holding that virtue was quite sufficient for happiness, and that it made man master of his world. Thus we see that to the doctrine of virtue, which the Cynics had magnified, the Stoics had added the vitalizing principle of the operation of man’s will, and thereby had made the pursuit of wisdom, which to them was identical with virtue, a powerful means of moral and spiritual edification. ”

“ It differed fundamentally from Philosophy, because it appealed not to culture, but to life. ... It was the spell of substantial facts, living facts, ... the spell of a loyalty to a personal Lord; and those who have not mastered the difference between a philosopher's speculations about life, and the actual record of a life which, in all that makes life holy and beautiful, transcended the philosopher's most pure and lofty dreams, have not understood yet the rudiments of the reason why the Stoic could not, while Christianity could and did, regenerate society. ”

“ The illustration is valuable for the light it throws on the essential unity of diverse intellectual operations as well as for enforcing once more the Stoic doctrine that different grades of knowledge are different grades of tension. Good and evil, virtues and vices, remarks Plutarch, are all capable of being “perceived”; sense, this common basis of all mental activity, is a sort of touch by which the ethereal Pneuma which is the soul's substance recognizes and measures tension. ”

“ How then, does it happen that the nature of man is the only one which ever abandons man, which forgets the body, which places the chief good, not in the whole man, but in a part of man? And how, as they themselves admit, and as is agreed upon by all, will it be preserved, so that that ultimate good of nature, which is the subject of our inquiry, shall resemble every nature? For it would resemble them, if in other natures also there were some ultimate point of excellence. For then that would seem to be the chief good of the Stoics. Why, then, do you hesitate to alter the principles of nature? ”