The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
32 THE STOIC CREED
of the sage or the philanthropist," while he "learned
to eschew rhetoric and poetry and fine language."
This
is significant. As it was the aim of the Stoics to form
men, and not merely to train reasoners or to produce
orators, that determined their mode of procedure. To
them, character was the great thing and so it seemed
;
better to stimulate the heart to morality and to attend
to conduct than to pose as learned pedants, or even
to delight the intellect with legitimate logic and
speculation.
Hence, the later Stoics have done themselves an
injustice. When what we have to judge them by is
simply a collection of partially disjointed reflections,
frequently reiterated, and of practical moral counsels
wise, searching, and direct, yet not systematized,
it
cannot but be that they should often appear to us
inconsistent, and that we should sometimes find it
extremely difficult to see how different utterances of
the same man are to be reconciled.
Lastly, we have the difficulty
of teaching
as tested
by practice.
We shall do the Stoics a grievous wrong
if we be
not on our guard against allowing our knowledge of the
aberrations of individual Stoics, or traditional stories
regarding them, or, perhaps, unworthy and false charges
of opponents against them, to prejudice us in our
estimate of the intrinsic value of the system. If, on
the one hand, there were Stoics who drew antinomian
conclusions from Stoical
premises, especially from the
of the wise man and the doctrine of "apathy" things
indifferent," and lived accordingly (just as there were