he scheme of life. The Stoics asserted that
virtue alone is good, vice alone evil, and that all else is absolutely
indifferent. Poverty, sickness, pain, and death, are not evils.
Riches, health, pleasure, and life, are not goods. A man may commit
suicide, for in destroying his life he destroys nothing of value.
Above all, pleasure is not a good. One ought not to seek pleasure.
Virtue is {351} the only happiness. And man must be virtuous, not for
the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of duty. And since virtue alone
is good, vice alone evil, there followed the further paradox that all
virtues are equally good, and all vices equally evil. There are no
degrees.

Virtue is founded upon reason, and so upon knowledge. Hence the
importance of science, physics, logic, which are valued not for
themselves, but because they are the foundations of morality. The
prime virtue, and the root of all other virtues, is therefore wisdom.
The wise man is synonymous with the good man. From the root-virtue,
wisdom, spring the four cardinal virtues, insight, bravery,
self-control, justice. But since all virtues have one root, he who
possesses wisdom possesses all virtue, he who lacks it lacks all. A
man is either wholly virtuous, or wholly vicious. The world is divided
into wise men and fools, the former perfectly good, the latter
absolutely evil. There is nothing between the two. There is no such
thing as a gradual transition from one to the other. Conversion must
be instantaneous. The wise man is perfect, has all happiness, freedom,
riches, beauty. He alone is the perfect king, statesman, poet,
prophet, orator, critic, physician. The fool has all vice, all misery,
all ugliness, all poverty. And every man is one or the other. Asked
where such a wise man was to be found, the Stoics pointed doubtfully
at Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. The number of the wise, they
thought, is small, and is continually growing smaller. The world,
which they painted in the blackest colours as a sea of vice and
misery, grows steadily worse.

In all this we easily recognize the features of a resuscitated
Cynicism. But the Stoics modified and softened {352} the harsh
outlines of Cynicism, and rounded off its angles. To do this meant
inconsistency. It meant that they first laid down harsh principles,
and then proceeded to tone them down, to explain them away, to admit
exceptions. Such inconsistency the Stoics accepted with their habitual
cheerfulness. This proces