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Updated: May 27, 2025
The sum total of these wanderings, when viewed from above, formed an interesting picture. A half-mystical, half-cynical reflection might take a certain pleasure in contemplating it; especially if, in memory of Calvin and the Stoics, this situation were called the expression of Absolute Reason and Divine Will.
But leaving now the gods, and beseeching them to give these Stoics common sense and a common understanding, let us look into their doctrines concerning the elements.
But Zeno, taking a stand on common-sense, fought for morality, as did Buddha before him, and long after him Reid and Beattie, when they combated the scepticism of Hume. Philosophy, according to Zeno and other Stoics, was intimately connected with the duties of practical life.
A. You are right in that; but I will provide against any accident. M. Have you any objection to our dismissing our friends the Stoics those, I mean, who allow that the souls exist after they have left the body, but yet deny that they exist forever?
Plato was the ally of the Stoics, as against the Epicureans, and of such modern theorists as Butler, who make virtue, and not happiness, the highest end of man. With him, discipline was an end in itself, and not a means; and he endeavoured to soften its rigour by his poetical and elevated Idealism.
Let any one, with Polemo, take the world; or with the Stoics, the aether, or the sun; or with Anaximenes, the air, to be God; and what a divinity, religion, and worship must we needs have! Nothing can be so dangerous as PRINCIPLES thus TAKEN UP WITHOUT QUESTIONING OR EXAMINATION; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men's lives, and give a bias to all their actions.
The ideal of the Stoics was the unclouded serenity of Socrates of whom Xanthippe declared that he had always the same face whether on leaving the house In the morning or on returning to it at night. As the motley crowd of passions followed the banners of their four leaders so specific forms of feeling sanctioned by reason were severally assigned to the three eupathies.
The Cynic answer, afterwards corrected and humanized by the Stoics, was to look at life as a long and arduous campaign. The loyal soldier does not trouble about his comfort or his rewards or his pleasures. He obeys his commander's orders without fear or failing, whether they lead to easy victories or merely to wounds, captivity or death.
But I was always told when young that the writing of it had led him to commit suicide a deed on his part which seems to have been painted in black colors, though Cato and Brutus, the Stoics, did the same thing very gloriously. The Epicureans are held to be sensualists, because they have used the word "pleasure" instead of "happiness," and Cicero is hard upon them.
The Stoics, indeed, believed in one supreme Divine Power, not however in a transcendental and personal God, but a cosmic, impersonal, fatalistic world-force. To Philo this conception, with its denial of the Divine will and the Divine care for the individual, was as atheistic as the Epicurean "chance."
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