Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

34 EPICTETUS.
being. The effort of Stoicism was to make life a fortress,
well-armed and guarded ;
while Epicurus would have made
it a garden of delight. The Stoic prided himself on being
the soldier of duty, and he had the martial manliness,
strength, and dignity in his bearing ;
he is altogether a
more impressive and inspiring figure to look upon than
the man who was bent on making pleasure his god.
It is not in Greece that we can see the full form of
Stoicism, or estimate its influence on human thought and
life. It nursed within it a certain sternness and hardness ;
it
magnified
the moral above the intellectual element in
Philosophy ;
it tended more and more as time went on to
regard Philosophy as the handmaid of practical conduct ;
and these were characteristics by no means specially attrac
tive to the bright, acute and mobile Greek, though
at the
same time the state of the world and the misery of life
were driving the later Greeks to the philosophers who
could best teach men to endure.
There was great intellectual
discursiveness in the Greek Stoical School. Chrysippus, who
succeeded Cleanthes as the head of the Sect, is said to have
written more than any other philosopher ;
and the Stoic
Metaphysics, Psychology, and Cosmology
are full of curious
interest. They concern themselves with the vexed questions
of Philosophy which are in debate in all ages,
and are as
unsettled still as when Thales first
began his quest of philoso
phical truth. The secret of tilings is still undiscovered. The
eureka of philosopher after philosopher
nately the hope and the despair
of mankind.
has awakened alter
But the actual
philosophizing, the endeavour to discover, is itself a necessary
intellectual discipline and is enlarging continually
the realm
of truth. Man is not born, says Goethe, to solve the
mystery of existence ;
but he must nevertheless attempt it,
that he may learn how to keep
within the limits of the