Seneca - College of Stoic Philosophers

THE. PHILOSOPHY OF SENECA 177lectures in order to sharpen their wits rather thanimprove their characters. The most mischievousof mortals he declares to be those who bring theirphilosophy to market and by not practising whatthey preach seem a living proof of the futilityof their doctrines. He argues with force againstthose who maintained the sufficiency of generalprinciples and the needlessness of precepts fortheir application to the conduct of life. Virtue,he says, consists partly in theory and partly inpractice you ought both to learn and to make;good what you have learnt by your actions. Ifthis is so, the precepts of wisdom are of service aswell as her decrees ;they issue, as it were, edictsby which our affections are bound and constrained.The earlier philosophers were so occupied withthe form of the human understanding that theyneglectedits material content. The driving powerwas supplied but continued unlinked to theengine to be driven. Seneca, too, considered theexternal world but as the material of wise men—the ball, not prized for its own sake, on whichthe playeris to exercise his skill— but to showthe bearing of this discovery on the actualcircumstances of life and action seemed to himthe main business of philosophy.Not out of ivory only [he tells us] was Phidias skilledmaking statues, he made them of bronze ;ifyoubrought marble or any cheaper material to him hewould turn it to the best use of which it was capable.So, if riches fall to him, the wise man wiU display hiswisdom amidst riches, if not, then in poverty ; if hecan, in his native country,if not, then in exile; if heN