United States or Central African Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
By no means; for your discourse has brought me over to your opinion. Let the Stoics, then, think it their business to determine whether pain be an evil or not, while they endeavor to show by some strained and trifling conclusions, which are nothing to the purpose, that pain is no evil.
So that what in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics meets us at every step the combination of monotheism with polytheism is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of phrase to indicate various aspects or functions in physical and moral things. When religion appears to us in this light its contradictions and controversies lose all their bitterness.
Not to be content with life is the unsatisfactory state of those who destroy themselves; who, being afraid to live, run blindly upon their own death, which no man fears by experience: and the Stoics had a notable doctrine to take away the fear thereof; that is, in such extremities, to desire that which is not to be avoided, and wish what might be feared; and so made evils voluntary and to suit with their own desires, which took off the terror of them.
Some of the most highly educated Greeks may have understood the arguments for and against immaterial Reality, and accepted or rejected them. Roughly speaking, Platonists accepted, Stoics and Epicureans rejected; and it was at least possible for Platonists, if they identified Mind with immaterial Reality, to believe in the immortality of the human mind.
Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to him, than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt. "Che non men the saver, dubbiar m' aggrata."
Very quickly after his Academica, in B.C. 45, came the five books, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written as though with the object of settling the whole controversy, and declaring whether the truth lay with the Epicureans, the Stoics, or the Academics. What, at last, is the good thing, and what the evil thing, and how shall we gain the one and avoid the other?
The Stoics, who aspired to establish a religious philosophy for all mankind, and pursued a vigorous missionary propaganda, particularly in the East, saw in the Jews not only obstinate opponents but dangerous rivals, who carried on a competing mission with provoking success.
Immediate satisfaction, or relief, and those who confer it, are treated with contempt, and presented as in hostility to the perfection of the mental structure. The Stoics altered this theory by saying that only the first of the three was bonum; the others were merely praeposita or sumenda. Lastly, it was maintained by Eudoxus, one of the most estimable philosophers contemporary with Aristotle.
Even with this prelude, the claims of this wandering Jew to pose as the instructor of Epicureans and Stoics, and to possess a knowledge of the Divine which they lacked, were daring. The spirit in which Paul approached his difficult audience teaches all Christian missionaries and controversialists a needed and neglected lesson.
Three houses, you see, won't turn up at all, Abercrombie's hardly ever sends anyone, and I don't mind betting that Christy gets round 'the Bull' somehow." "Yes; but, confound it all," said Gordon, "are we going to be dictated to by these outhouse potentates? The Stoics is more a School House society than anything else; and, what's more, it is going to remain so.
Word Of The Day