The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

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which transcends life ; but with the Cynics it is only the conviction that it is easier to reduce their wishes and their wants to the minimum, than to attain to the maximum in their satisfaction, which indeed is impossible, for with their satisfaction the wishes and wants grow ad infinitum; therefore, in order to reach the goal of all ancient ethics, the greatest happiness possible in this life, they took the path of renunciation as the shortest and easiest : " 60ev icai rov Kwia-fiov et,pr)ica<nv <tvvto/j.ov err apeTTjv 68ov." (Unde Gynismum dixere compendiosam ad virtutem viam.) Diog. Laert., vi. 9. The fundamental difference between the spirit of cynicism and that of asceticism comes out very clearly in the humility which is essential to the ascetic, but is so foreign to the Cynic that, on the contrary, he is distinguished beyond everything else for pride and scorn : —

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" Sapiens uno minor est Jove, dives, Liber, honoratus, pvZeher, rex denique regum." — Hor.

the other hand, the view of life held by the Cynics agrees in spirit with that of J. J. Eousseau as he expounds it in the " Discours sur VOrigine de I'lnegalite'." For he also would wish to lead us back to the crude state of nature, and regards the reduction of our wants to the minimum as the surest path to happiness. For the rest, the Cynics were exclusively practical philosophers : at least no account of their theoretical philosophy is known to me.

Now the Stoics proceeded from them in this way — they changed the practical into the theoretical. They held that the actual dispensing with everything that can be done without is not demanded, but that it is sufficient that we should regard possessions and pleasures constantly as dispensable, and as held in the hand of chance ; for then the actual deprivation of them, if it should chance to occur, would neither be unexpected nor fall heavily. One might always have and enjoy everything ; only one vol. 11. Z

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must ever keep present the conviction of the worthless ness and dispensableness of these good things on the one hand, and of their uncertainty and perishableness on the other, and therefore prize them all very little, and be always ready to give them up.

Nay more, he who must actually dispense with these things in order not to be moved by them, thereby shows that in his heart he holds them to be truly good things, which one must put quite out of sight if one is not to long after them. The wise man, on the other hand, knows that they are not good things at all, but rather perfectly indifferent things, a8ia<popa, in any case irporiy/xeva.

Therefore if they present themselves he will accept them, but yet is always ready to let them go again, if chance, to which they belong, should demand them back ; for they are rtov ovk e(jj f)p.iv. In this sense, Epictetus, chap, vii., says that the wise man, like one who has landed from a ship, &c, will also let himself be comforted by a wife or a child, but yet will always be ready, whenever the captain calls, to let them go again.

Thus the Stoics perfected the theory oi equanimity and independence at the cost of the practice for they reduced everything to a mental process, and b) arguments, such as are presented in the first chapter o: Epictetus, sophisticated themselves into all the amenitiei of life.

But in doing so they left out of account tha everything to which one is accustomed becomes a need and therefore can only be given up with pain; that th will does not allow itself to be played with, cannot enjo; without loving the pleasures ; that a dog does not remai) indifferent if one draws a piece of meat through its moutl and neither does a wise man if he is hungry ; and tha there is no middle path between desiring and renouncin< But they believed that they satisfied their principles i sitting at a luxurious Eoman table, they left no dis untasted, yet at the same time protested that they wei each and all of them mere irporf/fieva, not cvyada ; or i plain English, if they eat, drank, and were merry,