The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

12 THE STOIC CREED
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he will learn . . .
prudence in affairs private as well
as public ;
he will learn to order his own house in the
best manner, and he will be able to speak and act for
the best in the affairs of the State. Do I understand
you, I said ;
and is
your meaning that you
teach the
art of politics, and that you promise to make men good
citizens ? That, Socrates, is exactly the profession
which I make." In this respect they may be desig
nated professors of intellectual fencing, with a dis
tinct and definite practical end in view. But they were
philosophers also ; and, although they
had no fixed
philosophical system of their own, although they
founded no school, philosophical principles lay at the
root of their dialectical procedure,
for there can be no
true education, there can be no true rhetoric (even if
we understand rhetoric simply as oratory, forensic or
political), that does not implicate psychology. It was
in his treatise on Rhetoric, not in his Psychology, that
Aristotle gave his completest analysis of the Emotions ;
and modern writers on Rhetoric have equally laid
psychology under contribution witness, for example,
Campbell in his Philosophy of Rhetoric and Bain in his
Rhetoric and Composition.
What, then, was peculiar to the Sophists
as philo
sophical educationists was this. In philosophy, they
made the first great start towards amended thinking
under the leading of Protagoras by departing from the
old physical speculation and directing man s
attention
specially to man himself. In doing so, they raised
some of the perennial problems of thought and will
(such as, the nature and power of reason, the value of