Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xlii INTRODUCTION SECT.
culture, though it may have its uses as a prophylactic.
'The plank-bed and the skin' 1 were parts of 'boyish
aspiration '
; the tub of Diogenes was adopted on its
merits positive and negative, not its discomforts, as a
domicile. Towards all externals the philosopher's strict
attitude is nonchalance, the charter of his self-sufficiency.
He does not count pains or privations of any kind as
salutary; he only defies and derides, when he cannot
affect to ignore : if once they presume to influence or
modify the will, they must be annulled. Apart from
that they remain, in the strictest sense, indifferent.
Now with much of all this with the identification
of virtue and happiness, with the supremacy and self-
sufficiency of the moral will, with the oneness and in-
divisibility of virtue, with the valuation of external
goods, with the cultivation of 'indifference,' and the
contingent
claims of self-renunciation the Stoic was
in complete agreement, and the points of divergence did
not, at first sight, seem practical or of much significance.
They chiefly concerned that 'agreement with nature'
on which the Cynics took their stand.
Zeno, so far as express record goes, seems to have
shrunk from the full formula, regarding it, perhaps, as
perilously wide, and to have phrased his aim as '
life in
agreement,' that is to say, a realised self-consistency of
conduct and aim, attained by settled self-conformity of
the inner will. Now in this there might seem nothing
alien to the scope of Cynism ; the assertion of the
cardinal principle is rendered, if possible, more uncondi-
tional than before. But, as a matter of fact, the insertion
1 i. 6.