Stoicism - College of Stoic Philosophers

250 STOICISM.asceticism, the victory of the will ;on the other hand,there are the genial, kindly, human feelings ;thereis the wise passivity of mind ;there is the breadth ofsympathy which counterbalances an over-concentratedintensity of aim. To make the formula, " Live accordingto nature," of any value we require to havethese conflicting tendencies harmonized with eachother." 1To this train of reasoning a recent writer has givenwhat he thinks to be not only the Socratic, but theChristian answer, and with this we may be content,perhaps, to leave the subject." 'The spirit of aspirationand effort ' is not opposed to ' the genial,'the breadth ofkindly, human feelings,' nor tosympathy ' 'of which he speaks. The progress, theconflict, the 'good fight is an effort not by an externalpower to drive Nature from her course, or evento control her activity, but by Nature herself,as revealedto us internally and externally, to vindicateher supremacy over the denaturalizing influences,over the rebellious subjects within her own realm,which oppose her free development and harmoniousaction. When the conflict is peculiarly hard, whenthe external principle of disorder has succeeded inranging the animal and sensual against the rationaland spiritualpropensities, and when Nature herself,as a whole, is in danger of being degraded from ahuman nature into something worse than a brutenature, she calls— and in the case of saints andmartyrs calls not in vain — for aid from above.' " Oxford Essays," p. 90.