312 PSTCHOLOGT. 



fulcrum of all appeals. But if a man has given up those 

 things which are subject to foreign fate, and ceased to 

 regard them as parts of himself at all, we are well-nigh 

 powerless over him. The Stoic receipt for contentment 

 was to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was out of 

 your own power, — then fortune's shocks might rain down 

 nnfelt. E])ictetus exhorts us, l)y thus narrowing and at the 

 same time solidifying our Self to make it invulnerable : " I 

 must die ; well, but must I die groaning too ? I will speak 

 what appears to be right, and if the despot says, then I 

 will put you to death, I will reply, ' When did I ever tell 

 you that I was immortal ? You will do your part and I 

 mine ; it is yours to kill and mine to die intrepid ; yours to 

 banish, mine to depart untroubled.' How do we act in a 

 voyage ? We choo ie the pilot, the sailors, the hour. After- 

 wards comes a storm. What have I to care for ? My part 

 is performed. This matter belongs to the pilot. But the 

 ship is sinking ; what then have I to do ? That which alone 

 I can do — submit to being drowned without fear, without 

 clamor or accusing of God, but as one avIio knows that 

 what is born must likewise die." * 



This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enough 

 in its place and time, is, it must be confessed, only possible 

 as an habitual mood of the soul to narrow and unsympa- 

 thetic characters. It proceeds altogether by exclusion. If 

 I am a Stoic, the goods I cannot ap^jropriate cease to be my 

 goods, and the temptation lies very near to deny that they 

 are goods at all. We find this mode of protecting the Self 

 by exclusion and denial very common among people who 

 are in other respects not Stoics. All narrow j)eople intrench 

 their Me, they retract it, — from the region of what they can- 

 not securely possess. People who don't resemble them, oi 

 who treat them with indifterence, people over whom they 

 gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however 

 meritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chill 

 negation, if not with positive hate. Who will not be mine 

 I will exclude from existence altogether ; that is, as far as 



*T. W. Higginsou's tniuslatiou (1866), p. 105. 



