Therefore you are all of you seeking for this, and so are those who say that they pursue whatever comes into their mind and occurs to them; and you return to nature. But nature will fairly reply to you, that it is not true that the chief happiness of life is to be sought in another quarter, but the principles of action in herself: for that there is one system only, in which both the principles of action and the chief good too is contained; and that, as the opinion of Aristo is exploded, when he says that one thing does not differ from another, and that there is nothing except virtue and vice in which there was any difference whatever; so, too, Zeno was in the wrong, who affirmed that there was no influence in anything, except virtue or vice, of the very least power to assist in the attainment of the chief good: and as that had no influence on making life happy, but only in creating a desire for things, he said that there was some power of attraction in them: just as if this desire had no reference to the acquisition of the chief good. But what can be less consistent than what they say, namely, that when they have obtained the knowledge of the chief good they then return to nature, in order to seek in it the principle of action, that is to say, of duty? For it is not the principle of action or duty which impels them to desire those things which are [pg 229] according to nature; but desire and action are both set in motion by those things.
XVIII. Now I come to those brief statements of yours which you call conclusions; and first of all to that—than which, certainly, nothing can be more brief—that "everything good is praiseworthy; but everything praiseworthy is honourable; therefore everything good is honourable." Oh, what a leaden dagger!—for who will grant you your first premises? And if it should be granted to you, then you have no need of the second: for if everything good is praiseworthy, so is everything honourable; who, then, will grant you this, except Pyrrho, Aristo, and men like them?—whom you do not approve of. Aristotle, Xenocrates, and all that school, will not grant it; inasmuch as they call health, strength, riches, glory, and many other things good, but not praiseworthy; and they therefore do not think that the chief good is contained in virtue alone, though still they do prefer virtue to everything else. What do you think that those men will do who have utterly separated virtue from the chief good, Epicurus, Hieronymus, and those too, if indeed there are any such, who wish to defend the definition of the chief good given by Carneades? And how will Callipho and Diodorus be able to grant you what you ask, men who join to honourableness something else which is not of the same genus?—Do you, then, think it proper, Cato, after you have assumed premises which no one will grant to you, to derive whatever conclusion you please from them? Take this sorites, than which you think nothing can be more faulty: “That which is good is desirable; that which is desirable ought to be sought for; that which ought to be sought for is praiseworthy,” and so on through all the steps. But I will stop here, for in the same manner no one will grant to you that whatever ought to be sought is therefore praiseworthy; and that other argument of theirs is far from a legitimate conclusion, but a most stupid assertion, “that a happy life is one worthy of being boasted of.” For it can never happen that a person may reasonably boast, without something honourable in the circumstances. Polemo will grant this to Zeno; and so will his master, and the whole of that school, and all the rest who, preferring virtue by far to everything else, still add something besides to it in their definition of the chief good. For, [pg 230] if virtue be a thing worthy of being boasted of, as it is, and if it is so far superior to all other things that it can scarcely be expressed how much better it is; then a man may, possibly, be happy if endowed with virtue alone, and destitute of everything else; and yet he will never grant to you that nothing whatever is to be classed among goods, except virtue.
But those men whose chief good has no virtue in it, will perhaps not grant to you that a happy life has anything in it of which a man can rightly boast, although they also, at times, represent virtues as subjects for boasting. You see, therefore, that you are either assuming propositions which are not admitted, or else such as, even if they are granted, will do you no good.
XIX. In truth, in all these conclusions, I should think this worthy both of philosophy and of ourselves,—and that, too, most especially so when we were inquiring into the chief good,—that our lives, and designs, and wishes should be corrected, and not our expressions. For who, when he has heard those brief and acute arguments of yours which, as you say, give you so much pleasure, can ever have his opinion changed by them? For when men fix their attention on them, and wish to hear why pain is not an evil, they tell him that to be in pain is a bitter, annoying, odious, unnatural condition, and one difficult to be borne; but, because there is in pain no fraud, or dishonesty, or malice, or fault, or baseness, therefore it is not an evil. Now, the man who hears this said, even if he does not care to laugh, will still depart without being a bit more courageous as to bearing pain than he was when he came. But you affirm that no one can be courageous who thinks pain an evil. Why should he be more courageous if he thinks it—what you yourself admit it to be—bitter and scarcely endurable? For timidity is generated by things, and not by words. And you say, that if one letter is moved, the whole system of the school will be undermined. Do I seem, then, to you to be moving a letter, or rather whole pages? For although the order of things, which is what you so especially extol, may be preserved among them, and although everything may be well joined and connected together, (for that is what you said,) still we ought not to follow them too far, if arguments, having set out from false principles, are consistent with themselves, and do not wander from the end they propose to themselves.
Accordingly, in his first establishment of his system, your master, Zeno, departed from nature; and as he had placed the chief good on that superiority of disposition which we call virtue, and had affirmed that there was nothing whatever good which was not honourable, and that virtue could have no real existence if in other things there were things of which one was better or worse than another; having laid down these premises, he naturally maintained the conclusions. You say truly; for I cannot deny it. But the conclusions which follow from his premises are so false that the premises from which they are deduced cannot be true. For the dialecticians, you know, teach us that if the conclusions which follow from any premises are false, the premises from which they follow cannot be true. And so that conclusion is not only true, but so evident that even the dialecticians do not think it necessary that any reasons should be given for it—“If that is the case, this is; but this is not; therefore that is not.” And so, by denying your consequence, your premise is contradicted. What follows, then?—“All who are not wise are equally miserable; all wise men are perfectly happy: all actions done rightly are equal to one another; all offences are equal.” But, though all these propositions at first appear to be admirably laid down, after a little consideration they are not so much approved of. For every man's own senses, and the nature of things, and truth itself, cried out, after a fashion, that they could never be induced to believe that there was no difference between those things which Zeno asserted to be equal.
XX. Afterwards that little Phœnician of yours (for you know that the people of Citium, your clients, came from Phœnicia), a shrewd man, as he was not succeeding in his case, since nature herself contradicted him, began to withdraw his words; and first of all he granted in favour of those things which we consider good, that they might be considered fit, and useful, and adapted to nature; and he began to confess that it was more advantageous for a wise—that is to say for a perfectly happy—man, to have those things which he does not venture indeed to call goods, but yet allows to be well adapted to nature. And he denies that Plato, if he were not a wise man, would be in the same circumstances as the tyrant Dionysius; for that to die was better for the one, [pg 232] because he despaired of attaining wisdom, but to live was better for the other, because of his hope of doing so. And he asserts that of offences some are tolerable, and some by no means so, because many men passed by some offences, and there are others which very few people pass by, on account of the number of duties violated. Again, he said that some men are so foolish as to be utterly unable ever to arrive at wisdom; but that there are others who, if they had taken pains, might have attained to it. Now, in this he expressed himself differently from any one else, but he thought just the same as all the rest. Nor did he think those things deserving of being valued less which he himself denied to be goods, than they did who considered them as goods. What, then, did he wish to effect by having altered these names? At least he would have taken something from their weight, and would have valued them at rather less than the Peripatetics, in order to appear to think in some respects differently from them, and not merely to speak so.
What more need I say? What do you say about the happy life to which everything is referred? You affirm that it is not that life which is filled with everything which nature requires; and you place it entirely in virtue alone. And as every controversy is usually either about a fact or a name, both kinds of dispute arise if either the fact is not understood or if a mistake is made as to the name; and if neither of these is the case, we must take care to use the most ordinary language possible, and words as suitable as can be,—that is, such as make the subject plain. Is it, then, doubtful that if the former philosophers have not erred at all as to the fact itself, they certainly express themselves more conveniently? Let us, then, examine their opinions, and then return to the question of names.
XXI. They say that the desire of the mind is excited when anything appears to it to be according to nature; and that all things which are according to nature are worthy of some esteem; and that they deserve to be esteemed in proportion to the weight that there is in each of them: and that of those things which are according to nature, some have in themselves nothing of that appetite of which we have already frequently spoken, being neither called honourable nor praiseworthy; and some, again, are accompanied by pleasure in the [pg 233] case of every animal, and in the case of man also with reason. And those of them which are suitable are honourable, beautiful, and praiseworthy; but the others, mentioned before, are natural, and, when combined with those which are honourable, make up and complete a perfectly happy life. But they say, too, that of all these advantages—to which those people do not attribute more importance who say that they are goods, than Zeno does, who denies it—by far the most excellent is that which is honourable and praiseworthy; but that if two honourable things are both set before one, one accompanied with good health and the other with sickness, it is not doubtful to which of them nature herself will conduct us: but, nevertheless, that the power of honourableness is so great, and that it is so far better than, and superior to, everything else, that it can never be moved by any punishments or by any bribes from that which it has decided to be right; and that everything which appears hard, difficult, or unfortunate, can be dissipated by those virtues with which we have been adorned by nature; not because they are trivial or contemptible—or else where would be the merit of the virtues?—but that we might infer from such an event, that it was not in them that the main question of living happily or unhappily depended.
In short, the things which Zeno has called estimable, and worth choosing, and suitable to nature, they call goods; but they call that a happy life which consists of those things which I have mentioned, or, if not of all, at least of the greatest number of them, and of the most important. But Zeno calls that the only good which has some peculiar beauty of its own to make it desirable; and he calls that life alone happy which is passed with virtue.
XXII. If we are to discuss the reality of the case, then there cannot possibly, Cato, be any disagreement between you and me: for there is nothing on which you and I have different opinions; let us only compare the real circumstances, after changing the names. Nor, indeed, did he fail to see this; but he was delighted with the magnificence and splendour of the language: and if he really felt what he said, and what his words intimate, then what would be the difference between him and Pyrrho or Aristo? But if he did not approve of them, then what was his object in differing in language with those men with whom he agreed in reality?