In describing those systems which make virtue consist in propriety, Smith displays a profound knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, and the later schools of Greek philosophy. His admiration of Zeno and Epictetus is almost unbounded, especially when he contemplates their confident opinion that a man should always be able to support worldly misfortunes. “They endeavour to point out the comforts which a man might still enjoy when reduced to poverty, when driven into banishment, when exposed to the injustice of popular clamour, when labouring under blindness, deafness, in the extremity of old age, upon the approach of death.” He holds that the few fragments which have been preserved of this philosophy are among the most instructive remains of antiquity. “The spirit and manhood of their doctrines make a wonderful contrast with the desponding, plaintive, and whining tone of some modern systems.” Chrysippus, on the other hand, did but reduce stoicism into a scholastic or technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and subdivisions, “one of the most effectual expedients, perhaps, for extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical system.”
Admirable as were the best stoics and epicureans and those Roman writers who, like Cicero and Seneca, direct us to the imperfect but attainable virtues, they quite misunderstood nature. “By nature, the events which immediately affect that little department in which we ourselves have some little management and direction, which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are the events which interest us the most and which chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows.” Here and in similar passages he follows his favourite, Pope:—
“God loves from whole to parts; but human soul
Must rise from individual to the whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov’d, a circle straight succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads;
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace;
His country next; and next all human race.”