BOOK II.
Chapter I.
[1.] According to the view of James Harris, in a long and valuable note communicated to Upton, the “master-argument” was so called from the supreme importance of the issues with which it dealt. On these issues different leaders of the Stoics took different sides, Diodorus holding both future and past things to be necessary, Cleanthes both contingent, and Chrysippus past things to be necessary and future contingent. Any two of the three propositions mentioned in the text exclude the third. For modern philosophy the distinction between the possible and the certain in the phenomenal world has, of course, no real existence; the possible being simply that of which we do not know whether it will come to pass or not.
[2.] Of course Epictetus here speaks ironically; all this is just what it is the business of a thinker to do.
[3.] Epictetus, I suppose, means to complain that the current phrases of philosophy are dealt out in glib answer to great ethical questions, just as Homer might be quoted for an event in the life of Odysseus, by persons who in neither case think of gaining that vital conviction which only the strenuous exercise of one’s own reason can produce. A little later he represents Hellanicus, the historian, as quoted on the distinction between good and evil, who never treated that subject. If it is to be a mere question of authority, one name is as good as another, since none is any use at all.
“Indifferent,” be it observed, is morally indifferent—that which has in itself no bearing on our moral state. See Chap. [II. 2.]
[4.] The followers of Aristotle called themselves Peripatetics.
Chapter II.
[1.] The word in the Greek is περιστάσεις, literally circumstances, but the word is evidently used in a bad sense, as equivalent to afflictions. Doom is likewise etymologically a neutral word, but one which has received an evil meaning.
[2.] Socrates’s faith in his genius or “Dæmon” was well known. In this passage from his Apologia (which Epictetus gives from a bad text), it is doubtless the manner only that conveyed the idea of mockery. Neither Socrates nor any one else ever had better evidence of God’s existence than His voice in our conscience.