“Labour then,” he says in another place, “to cure, to change yourself; do not delay until to-morrow. If you say, to-morrow I will pay heed to myself, know it is as if you should say, to-day I will be base, shameless, cowardly, angry, cruel, and envious. Observe the evil you allow yourself by this guilty indulgence. But if it is a good thing for you to be converted and to watch attentively over your actions and your will, how much more so it is to start to-day! If it is useful to-morrow, to-day it is far more so. For by starting to-day, to-morrow you will already be stronger, and will not be tempted to put off to a third day.” This is the general tone of the philosophy of this period. Penetrating and familiar in Epictetus, it is more pompous and vague in the ex-rhetorician Dion Chrysostom,[g] more incisive, vehement, and varied in Seneca,[h] more elevated and touching in Marcus Aurelius. But with all of these we encounter pressing exhortations or lively remonstrances, and as might be expected the remonstrance prevails. They believed, in fact, that we are never, whatever our virtue, beyond the state of convalescence, and that those who wish to be healthy and well, as Musonius Rufus said, must live and behave toward themselves as if they were continually striving to be cured. They also wished that men should quit their school sad and discontented with themselves.
While the philosopher addresses these reprimands and exhortations to others in order to convert them, he continually makes reference to himself, and his words have often a familiarity and passion resembling feeling and confession. Horace, Seneca, Epictetus, Euphrates, habitually practised a genuine examination of their conscience, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius[i] are simply a monologue, in which the wise emperor has set down his hopes and discouragements; he continually speaks to console, to exhort, to rouse, to reproach, or to approve himself. But as if the stoic who had imagined an ideal too great and sublime had the bitter feeling that he could not attain it, without ceasing he complains of himself and of his want of heart. “O my soul!” he cries, “when wilt thou be good and simple, and always the same? When wilt thou have tender good will to all men? When wilt thou be rich enough of thyself to want for nothing? When, resigned to thy condition, wilt thou take pleasure in all that is, persuaded that thou hast in thyself all that thou needest, that all is well with thee, that there is nothing that does not come to thee from the gods and that all that it has pleased them to ordain or that they shall ordain can be but good for thee and in general for the preservation of the world? When wilt thou have prepared thyself to live with the gods and with man in such a manner that thou mayst never complain of them and that they may no longer have anything to blame in thine actions?”
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius have a rough and familiar vividness in their speech which shows with what energy of conviction and of faith their souls were filled. Seneca, for whom stoicism was more a matter for imagination and for wit, appears to have a less persuasive eloquence, because he is himself less persuaded; but he has an incontestable superiority in the censure of manners as well as in the extent and variety of his experience. There is no vice, weakness, or eccentricity that he has not found out, and even amongst our great French moralists I know of no shrewder or more profound observer of the human heart.
But the severe reproof of vice is not everything; the philosopher is only in truth “the messenger of God” to men when he knows how to console, encourage, and support them in times of depression and of faltering, and by generous and sympathetic pity to reawaken in their hearts the nearly extinguished sense of their own dignity and strength. “Oh!” exclaims Seneca, “this is not the time to amuse one’s self with many words. Philosopher, those who summon you to go to them are the helpless and the miserable. You should carry help to the shipwrecked, the captives, the beggars, and the sick, to those whose heads are already on the block. You have promised this. To all the fine speeches you can utter, the afflicted and distressed answer but one thing: Help us! All stretch out their hands towards you; it is from you that they implore help for their life lost or on the verge of being lost. All their hope and resource is in you. They implore you to rescue them from the abyss towards which they are struggling and to throw the salutary light of truth before their erring footsteps.” Suffering and tears had in fact instructed these masters in human life, and the sad lessons of experience, without lessening the pride of their courage, inspired them with that compassion for the misery of others which had perhaps at first been wanting to the stoic philanthropy:
“Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.”
Stoicism did not stop at the theory of universal justice or the equality of men and of the unity of our kind; it added to it that of universal charity. I shall not say that the stoics of the empire made innovations on this point, nor that they introduced into the doctrine new ideas or even simply original developments, which transformed philosophy by extending it. I do not believe it, and I have found nothing in Seneca or in Epictetus, either in the principles or in the results, that I have not already found in the early stoicism. But it is probable that ideas took a more practical form, that theories gave place to precepts and to rules for conduct; that, whilst getting free from the severe and logical machinery of discussion and taking the more effective form of eloquence, the morality became more popular and efficacious; and finally by force of constant repetition in the schools of the philosophers, in the basilicas of the orators, in the libraries where literary meetings were held, in the gymnasia where the sophists made their displays, and even in the public places of the large towns, where the cynics delivered the finest maxims in the midst of their coarse but often striking invectives, it ended by storming men’s intellects and taking entire possession of them.
And it should be noticed that this morality is not at the struggling, reasoning stage, like a truth which is feeling its way and is not sure of itself, nor does it hover on the surface like those borrowed ideas that come from no one knows where and which are welcomed from time to time with curiosity, but which always remain strangers or passing novelties; it dominates and takes hold of the intellect with that firm, full, constant, insensible, and unquestionable possession which characterises the inveterate supremacy of habit. Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch could not think or speak otherwise than as they did because the philanthropic ideas of stoicism have become an integral and essential part of their nature, or, to use an expression belonging to Marcus Aurelius, because these ideas are from henceforth for every intellect the air they are accustomed to breathe and which nourishes them.
According to the constant doctrine of the Stoa, it is impossible not to perceive that the author of all things made us for one another and put into our hearts the instinct of humanity. This principle had passed from the discussions of the philosophers into the declamations of the orators, into the verses of the poets, into the spirit of all the writers. “Is there a better sentiment than compassion,” says Quintilian, “a sentiment which has a deeper origin in the venerable and sacred principles of nature? God, the author of mortal beings, wishes us to help one another mutually, and in helping one another we are guaranteed against the fickleness of fortune. It is not love nor charity, it is a foreseeing and, I venture to say, a religious fear of the misfortunes which may overtake us. In the want and hunger of others it is himself that each of us pities. To help the unfortunate is to deserve well of things human. What! if I had fed a stranger for the sake of this universal fraternity which unites all mortals under the common father of nature, would it not have been a good action to have saved a soul about to perish, had pity on humanity, and thrown, as it were, a propitiatory offering to fortune while adoring the divinity in the thought of our common lot? Humanity has been in all ages and amongst all nations the greatest and most sacred mystery.” Juvenal expresses the same thing in a more vivid and more touching manner. “Nature, by giving us tears, avows that she has bestowed feeling hearts on men; tears are the best part of our conscience.
“Nature makes us weep over the misfortunes of an afflicted friend, at the sad countenance of an accused prisoner, at the dangers of a ward who is the victim of a guardian’s frauds. It is by her ordinance that we lament when we meet the coffin of a virgin carried off in the flower of her youth, in seeing a little child shut in under the sod of the grave. Where is the good man, the religious man, who sees the ills of others as if they were strangers to him? This is what separates us from the herd of speechless animals; thus we possess a saintly nature and we alone are capable of divine things, having received from heaven conscience denied to the brutes whose faces are turned earthward. At the origin of the world, the common author of all beings gave to animals only life, whilst we were given a reasonable soul, in order that mutual affection should teach us to give and to expect from others assistance and help.”