because in one instance in a thousand million it chances to throw down an individual, which happens to be me, and breaks a bone or two of mine, and leaves me for the brief span of my remaining pilgrimage with a limping gait? If Epictetus could say to his cruel master under torture, "You will break my leg if you keep on," and then when it broke could smilingly add, "I told you so,"-cannot we endure with fortitude, and even grateful joy, the incidental inflictions which so beneficent a master as the great law of gravitation in its magnificent impartiality may see fit to mete out to us?

A current of electricity, seeking its way from sky to earth, finds on some particular occasion the body of a beloved husband, a dear son, an honoured father of dependent children, the best conductor between the air and the earth, and kills the person through whose body it takes its swift and fatal course. Yet this law has no malevolence in its impartial heart. On the contrary the beneficent potency of the laws of electricity is so great that our largest hopes for the improvement of our economic condition rest on its unexplored resources.

A group of bacteria, ever alert to find matter not already appropriated and held in place by vital forces stronger than their own, find their food and breeding place within a human body, and subject

our friend or our child to weeks of fever, and perchance to death. Yet we cannot call evil the great biological law that each organism shall seek its meat from God wherever it can find it. Indeed were it not for these micro-organisms, and their alertness to seize upon and transform into their own living substance everything morbid and unwholesome, the whole earth would be nothing but a vast charnel house reeking with the intolerable stench of the undisintegrated and unburied dead.

The most uncompromising exponent of this second half of the Stoic doctrine in the modern world is Immanuel Kant. According to him the whole worth and dignity of life turns not on external fortune, nor even on good natural endowments, but on our internal reaction, the reverence of our will for universal law. "Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a Good Will. Intelligence, wit, judgment, and the other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore,

constitutes what is called character, is not good. It is the same with the gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health, and the general wellbeing and contentment with one's condition which is called happiness, inspire pride and often presumption, if there is not a good will to correct the influence of these on the mind."

"Everything in nature works according to laws. Rational beings alone have the faculty of acting according to the conception of laws, that is, according to principles; i.e. have a will."

"Consequently the only good action is that which is done out of pure reverence for universal law. This categorical imperative of duty is expressed as follows: Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a Universal Law of Nature.' And since every other rational being must conduct himself on the same rational principle that holds for me, I am bound to respect him as I do myself. Hence the second practical imperative is: So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, never as means only.'"

In Kant Stoicism reaches its climax. Law and the will are everything: possessions, even graces are nothing.

IV

THE STOIC SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

The problem of evil was the great problem of the Stoic, as the problem of pleasure was the problem of the Epicurean. To this problem the Stoic gives substantially four answers, with all of which we are already somewhat familiar:

First: Only that is evil which we choose to regard as such. To quote Marcus Aurelius once more on this fundamental point: "Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay." "Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint I have been harmed. Take away the complaint I have been harmed, and the harm is done away."

Second: Since virtue or integrity is the only good, nothing but the loss of that can be a real evil. When this is present, nothing of real value can be lacking. As Epictetus says, "Virtue suffers no vacancy in the place she inhabits ; she fills the whole soul, takes away the sensi

"As

bility of any loss, and is herself sufficient." the stars hide their diminished heads before the brightness of the sun, so pains, afflictions, and injuries are all crushed and dissipated by the greatness of virtue; whenever she shines, everything but what borrows its splendour from her disappears, and all manner of annoyances have no more effect upon her than a shower of rain upon the sea." "It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it." "Where a man can live at all, he can live well." "I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must go into exile. Does any man hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?" "Life itself is neither good nor evil, but only a place for good and evil." "It is the edge and temper of the blade that make a good sword, not the richness of the scabbard; and so it is not money and possessions that make a man considerable, but his virtue." "They are amusing fellows who are proud of things which are not in our power. A man says: I am better than you for I possess much land, and you are wasting with hunger. Another says: I am of consular rank; another: I have curly hair. But a horse does not say to a horse: I am superior to you, for I possess much fodder and much barley,