A History of Greek Philosophy / THE STOICS

Page 10

Thus the Stoics worked out on ideal and absolute lines the thought of righteousness as the chief and only good. Across this ideal picture were continually being drawn by opponents without or inquirers within, clouds of difficulty drawn from real experience. ‘What,’ it was asked, ‘of progress in goodness? Is this a middle state between good and evil; or if a middle state between good and evil be a contradiction, in terms, how may we characterise it?’ Here the wiser teachers had to be content to answer that it tended towards good, was good in possibility, would be absolutely good when the full attainment came, and the straining after right had been swallowed up in the perfect calm of settled virtue.

‘How also of the wise man tormented by pain, or in hunger and poverty and rags, is his perfectness of wisdom and goodness really sufficient to make him happy?’ Here, again, the answer had to be hesitating and provisional, through no fault of the Stoics. In this world, while we are still under the strange dominion of time and circumstance, the ideal can never wholly fit the real. There must still be difficulty and incompleteness here, only to be solved and perfected ‘when iniquity shall have an end.’ Our eyes may fail with looking upward, yet the upward look is well; and the jibes upon the Stoic ‘king in rags’ that Horace and others were so fond of, do not affect the question. It may have been, and probably often was, the case that Stoic teachers were apt to transfer to themselves personally the ideal attributes, which they justly assigned to the ideal man in whom wisdom was perfected.

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