The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
"
"
CHAPTER VIII
ETHICS :
EXPOSITION
"And virtue is self-sufficient for happiness."
ZENO.
"
This very place, which you call banishment, is fatherland to
those who inhabit it. So, nothing is wretched, unless you think
it ; and, on the other hand, every lot is blessed if it be borne with
BOETHIUS.
equanimity."
Non qui parum habet, sed qui plus cupit, pauper est.
SENECA.
"The aids to noble life are all within." MATTHEW ARNOLD.
I
IN their analysis of human nature, the Stoics started
with the
Platonic conception, that man is a compound
being consisting of two parts, a body and a soul. In
one place, indeed, Marcus Aurelius seems to make a
threefold division of man.
"Body, soul, mind," he
says (Med. iii. 16), "these three"; but immediately
he adds, the "to
body belong sensations, to the soul
impulses, to the mind principles
thereby
showing
that it is not a true trichotomy that he has in view,
but simply a loose classification of psychical processes
into sense, impulse, and intellection. "The im
pressions of sense," he continues,
"we share with
cattle of the field : the pulls of impulse with brute
beasts, with catamites, with Phalaris, or Nero ;
and
mind is still the guide to obvious duties, even for the
atheist, the traitor, and for those who lock the door
140