United States or Chile ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But the term was not thus restricted by the Stoics, who divided phantasies into sensible and not sensible. The latter came through the understanding and were of bodiless things which could only be grasped by reason. The ideas of Plato they declared existed only in our minds. Horse, man, and animal had no substantial existence but were phantasms of the soul.
With the most automatic calmness, it establishes a series in which luxury, so long proscribed by the stoics and ascetics, those masters of holiness, must appear in its turn as a principle of conduct as legitimate, as pure, and as grand as all those formerly invoked by religion and philosophy.
He was gratified by Lady Sunderbund's approval, but he affected not to see or hear it. But it was Bent who spoke. He spoke in the most casual way. He made the thing seem the most incidental of observations. "What puzzles me," he said, "is why the early Christians identified the Spermaticos Logos of the Stoics with the second and not with the third person of the Trinity."
And yet is it not evident that a man consists of more parts than a finger, and the world of more than a man? This indeed all men know and understand, unless they become Stoics; but if they are once Stoics, they on the contrary say and think that a man has no more parts than a finger, nor the world than a man.
But an ideal so remote that its realisation is despaired of, is as good as none. And the conception of the Stoics, if it was more comprehensive than that of Aristotle, was also less practical and real. By virtue, nevertheless, of this comprehensiveness, the Stoic ideal is more akin to modern tendencies than that of the soldier-citizen in the city-state.
The philosophy of Greece and the old Roman manner of life had raised up, it is true, in the higher ranks of society Stoics and jurists, the former the last champions of morality and the dignity of human nature, the latter the last enlightened servants of the civil community.
when he went about to change his suit of golden armor for a brazen one, and to give what was worth a hundred oxen for that which was worth but nine. And yet the brazen armor was no less useful for fight than the golden; whereas beauty and health of body, as the Stoics say, contribute not the least advantage so far as happiness is concerned. And yet they seek health in exchange for wisdom.
He declares that, in accordance with the theory of his brother meaning thereby the Stoics "it is necessary that they, the gods, should spy into every cottage along the road, so that they may look after the affairs of men." It is playful, argumentative, and satirical. At last he proposes to leave the subject.
But as to the reciprocities of individual friendship, Epicurus went beyond the Stoics, by the amount of self-sacrifice and devotion that he enjoined for the benefit of a friend. There is also in the Stoical system a recognition of duties to God, and of morality as based on piety. Not only are we all brethren, but also the 'children of one Father.
Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Sceptics it may be maintained that the efforts of thought represented by these names have had a deeper influence on the progress of man than any other continuous intellectual movement, at least until the rise of modern science in a new epoch of liberty.
Word Of The Day