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How different from the wily Hindu or Chinaman, with his almost preternatural sagacity in small practical matters! Scorn of theories is one of their chief race-characteristics, and that is why they end in becoming stoics stoics, that is, as the beasts are, who suffer without knowing why.
'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.
On the contrary, they would look on the mitigation of the punishment as an invitation to commit more crimes. I answered, 'It seems to me a very unjust thing to take away a man's life for a little money, for nothing in the world can be of equal value with a man's life: and if it be said, "that it is not for the money that one suffers, but for his breaking the law," I must say, extreme justice is an extreme injury: for we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal; as if there were no difference to be made between the killing a man and the taking his purse, between which, if we examine things impartially, there is no likeness nor proportion.
"The Stoics despised suffering, and Christians resign themselves to its chastisements; this constitutes one of the lines of demarcation between ancient and modern theology." "But there were many signal instances of virtue manifested in ancient times." "Yes; but for the most part, it was either exaggerated or false; unyielding pride, obstinate courage, implacable resentment of injuries.
The pretense and folly of Roman society made the Sophists possible like all sects they ministered to a certain cast of mind. Over against the Sophists there were the Stoics, the purest, noblest and sanest of all ancient cults, corresponding very closely to our Quakers, before Worth and Wanamaker threw them a hawse and took them in tow.
In his opinions on all these subjects, he was not a Stoic, nor an Epicurean, nor an Academic, but what would have been called by Stoics, Epicureans, and Academics a mere idiotes, a mere common man. And it was precisely because he was so that his name makes so great an era in the history of the world. It was because he dug deep that he was able to pile high.
In this particular, as well as in most others, Spinoza merely reproduces the error of the ancient Stoics.
This is what I mean: one of the Stoics sold himself into slavery to redeem his neighbour, so, you see, even a Stoic did react to stimulus, since, for such a generous act as the destruction of oneself for the sake of one's neighbour, he must have had a soul capable of pity and indignation. Here in prison I have forgotten everything I have learned, or else I could have recalled something else.
Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, he represents as the only teachers who arm and instruct a citizen for the duties of social life. Of these, the armor of the stoics was found to be of the firmest temper; and it was chiefly worn, both for use and ornament, in the schools of jurisprudence.
But the Stoics presently found themselves admitting or insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of daemons, of witchcraft, of divination, and when they combined with the Platonic school, of more dangerous elements still. I take the Stoics and Epicureans as the two most radical schools.
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