The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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146 THE STOIC CREED
nor jealousy has any place, and you yourself will not
desire to be a general, a president, or a consul, but to
be free. And to this there is one road, scorn of the
things that are not in our own power (Epic. Encheir.
19). Control the desires, then ; yea, as the older Stoics
held, eradicate them. Therein lies the secret of happi
ness : Seek not that the things which happen should
happen as you wish, but wish the things which happen
to be as they are, and you will have an even flow of
life"(#af. 8).
Now, let us look more narrowly at this doctrine of
the source of man s happiness, after premising that,
unlike Buddha and Schopenhauer, the Stoic started
with the acknowledgment that life is good and worth
living, and that man naturally desires happiness and
aims at it. The first impulse of every animal, as
Chrysippus said, is to preserve and to protect itself
4
the first thing proper to it is its own existence and
the consciousness thereof"
(Diog. Lae rt. vii. 52). This
means that its primary aim is to live, to obtain food
and drink, to reproduce its kind, and, in a word,
to find and continue the adaptation of internal to
external relations. In success lies its happiness ; in
failure its unhappiness. 1 Otherwise put, the good is
naturally attractive, and we are drawn to it when we
perceive it.
For, as the money-changer is
not allowed
to reject Caesar s coin, nor the greengrocer, but if you
show the coin, whether he will or not, he must give up
what is sold in exchange for the coin, so it is also in
1 Cf. Spinoza s doctrine of conatus in his Ethica (see, e.g., Pars
i.
prop. 18).