The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

PREDECESSORS OF STOICS IN ETHICS 135
true test of what is natural is the end or re Aos, and
that you are to interpret the lower by the higher, and
not, contrariwise, the higher by the lower ;
so that man
is to be estimated, not by what he was or even by what
at any moment he is, but by what he has it in him to
be or to become.
In their doctrine on this point, the Stoics were wiser.
They looked to the ideal, and refused to copy the
habits either of the lower animals or of primitive man.
Hence, they rose to the conception of a pure and noble
individual, sharer in the divine, and of a universal
brotherhood of mankind, and preached the necessity of
the individual regarding
himself as a citizen of the
world and discharging social duties. The Cynics, on
the other hand, were strictly individualistic in their
teaching. Personal freedom, individual independence,
was to them the great thing, and of the salvation of
the community or of the world they were sceptical.
Hence the Cynic was anti-social in his tendencies, and
lived as much outside society as he could, avoiding
social duties and renouncing family ties, devoid of
patriotism and devoted to criticism of accepted ideals,
living as a wanderer and a beggar.
Only contemning
the general run of mankind, whom he regarded as
deluded, he contracted a spirit of sourness and censoriousness,
which frequently expressed itself in
bitter
satire, thus justifying the modern acceptation of the
term "cynical"
as synonymous with acerbity and
malignant utterance.
Whatever the Stoics were, they
/were not cynical in this sense ;
and it signalizes their
philosophy that, in Marcus Aurelius, it could produce
a "philosopher-king" a man of gentle, noble nature,