estation when the individual, in the decay of public life, in the
disappearance of all beautiful morality, isolates himself, and seeks to
gain in his isolation such strength that he can bear the changes of
external history around him with composure--"ataraxy." The Stoics sought
to attain this end by turning their attention inward into pure
internality, and thus, by preserving the self-determination of abstract
thinking and willing, maintaining an identity with themselves: the
Epicureans endeavored to do the same, with this difference however, that
they strove after a positive satisfaction of the senses by filling them
with concrete pleasurable sensations. As a consequence of this, the
Stoics isolated themselves in order to maintain themselves in the
exclusiveness of their internal unconditioned relation to themselves,
while the Epicureans lived in companies, because they achieved the
reality of their pleasure-seeking principle through harmony of feeling
and through the sweetness of friendship. In so far the Epicureans were
Greeks and the Stoics Romans. With both, however, the beauty of
manifestation was secondary to the immobility of the inner feeling. The
plastic attainment of the Good and the Beautiful was cancelled in the
abstraction of thinking and feeling. This was the advent of the Roman
principle among the Greeks.

Sec. 216. The pedagogical significance of Stoicism and Epicureanism
consists in this, that, after the moral life in public and in private
were sundered from each other, the individual began to educate himself,
through philosophical culture, into stability of character, for which
reason the Roman emperors particularly disliked the Stoics. At many
times, a resignation to the Stoic philosophy was sufficient to make one
suspected. But, at last, the noble emperor, in order to win himself a
hold in the chaos of things, was forced himself to become a Stoic and to
flee to the inaccessible stillness of the self-thinking activity and the
self-moving will. Stoics and Epicureans had both what we call an ideal.
The Stoics used the expression "kingdom"; as Horace says, sarcastically,
"_Sapiens rex est nisi--pituita molesta est_."

II. _Practical Education._

Sec. 217. The truth of the solution of the beautiful individuality is the
promise of the activity conformable to its purpose [i.e. teleological
activity], which on the one hand considers carefully end and means, and
on the other hand seeks to realize the end