Volume 1 - Discourses - Books I - II - College of Stoic Philosophers

BOOK I. xi. 35-xii. 2do it, and we shall endeavour to destroy and excisethat cause more earnestly than we try to destroyand excise from the bodyits tumours and abscessesAnd in the same way we shall declare the same thingto be the cause of our good actions.And we shallno longer blame either slave, or neighbour, or wife,or children, as being the causes of any evils to us,since we are persuaded that, unless we decide thatthings are thus-and-so, 1 we do not perform the correspondingactions and;of our decision,, for or againstsomething,, we ourselves, and not things outside ofourselves, are the masters. Even so, he said. Fromthis very day, therefore, the thing whose nature orcondition w r e shall investigate and examine will beneither our farm, nor our slaves, nor our horses, norour dogs, but only the decisions of our will. Ihopeso, he said. You see, then, that it isnecessary for youto become a frequenter of the schools, that animalat which all men laugh, if you really desire to makean examination of the decisions of your own will.And that this is not the work of a single hour or dayyou know as well as I do.CHAPTER XIIOf contentmentCONCERNING gods there are some who say that thedivine does not so much as exist ;and others, that itexists, indeed, but is inactive and indifferent, andtakes forethought for 2nothing and a third ; set,that it exists and takes forethought, though onlyfor great and heavenly things and in no case forterrestrial things and a fourth ;set, that it also takes