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Updated: May 13, 2025
You may hear them and read many of their writings, in which they jangle with the Academics, and cry out against them as confounding all things with their paradox of indistinguishable identity, and as vehemently contending that there is but one quality in two substances.
"What is there that these clever children of our day do not understand? They have all the sciences at their fingers' ends. The universities and the academics teach them every thing in a twinkling, giving them a patent of learning." "Oh, that is unjust!" responded the canon, observing the pained expression of the engineer's countenance. "My aunt is right," declared Pepe.
But his meaning is, as I suspect, to assault the Cyrenaics first, and afterwards the Academics, who are followers of Arcesilaus.
This sentiment was far from being, as some have supposed, peculiar to the Epicureans, it has been adopted by philosophers of all sects, by Pythagoreans, by Stoics, by Peripatetics, by Academics; in short by the most godly the most virtuous men of Greece and of Rome. Pythagoras, according to Ovid, speaks strongly to the fact.
Thus, because the Stoics were more minute than other sects in inculcating the moral and social duties, we find the Roman jurisconsults professing themselves followers of Zeno; the orators, on the contrary, adopted the disputatious system of the later Academics; while Epicurus was the master of the idle and the wealthy.
But as those who have dust or dirt upon their bodies, if they touch or rub the filth that is upon them, seem rather to increase than remove it; so some men blame the Academics, and think them guilty of the faults with which they show themselves to be burdened. For who do more subvert the common conceptions than the Stoic school?
XXI. M. Perhaps I may find something to say; but I will make this observation first: do you take notice with what modesty the Academics behave themselves? for they speak plainly to the purpose. The Peripatetics are answered by the Stoics; they have my leave to fight it out, who think myself no otherwise concerned than to inquire for what may seem to be most probable.
Zeno, according to Cicero, supposed the soul to be an igneous substance, from whence he concluded it destroyed itself. Cicero, the philosophical orator, who was of the sect of Academics, although he is not on all occasions, in accord with himself, treats openly as fables the torments of Hell; and looks upon death as the end of every thing for man.
Among his works on speculative philosophy are "The Academics, or a history and defense of the belief of the new Academy;" "Dialogues on the Supreme Good, the end of all moral action;" "The Tusculan Disputations," containing five treatises on the fear of death, the endurance of pain, power of wisdom over sorrow, the morbid passions, and the relation of virtue to happiness.
"The former was chief of the Academics, the latter of the Stoics," said the Dominie, with some scorn of the supposition. "Yes, my dear sir, but it was Zenocrates, not Plato, who denied that pain was an evil." "I should have thought," said Pleydell, "that very respectable quadruped, which is just now limping out of the room upon three of his four legs, was rather of the Cynic school."
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