peeches they reject and
contemn them, as indifferent and of no use to virtue for the acquiring
felicity.

Now, forasmuch as all men esteem the sovereign good to be joyous,
desirable, happy, of the greatest dignity, self-sufficient, and wanting
nothing; compare their good, and see how it agrees with this common
conception. Does the stretching out a finger prudently produce this joy?
Is a prudent torture a thing desirable? Is he happy, who with reason
breaks his neck? Is that of the greatest dignity, which reason often
chooses to let go for that which is not good? Is that perfect and
self-sufficient, by enjoying which, if they possess not too indifferent
things, they neither can nor will endure to live? There is also another
tenet of the Stoics, by which custom is still more injured, taking and
plucking from her genuine notions, which are as her legitimate children,
and supposing other bastardly, wild, and illegitimate ones in their
room, and necessitating her to nourish and cherish the one instead of
the other; and that too in those principles which concern things good
and bad, desirable and avoidable, proper and strange, the energy of
which ought to be more clearly distinguished than that of hot and cold,
black and white. For the imaginations of these things are brought in
by the senses from without; but those have their original bred from the
good things which we have within us. But these men entering with their
logic upon the topic of felicity, as on the sophism called Pseudomenos,
or that named Kyrieuon, have removed no ambiguities, but brought in very
many.

Indeed, of two good things, of which the one is the end and the other
belongs to the end, none is ignorant that the end is the greater and
perfecter good. Chrysippus also acknowledges this difference, as is
manifest from his Third Book of Good Things. For he dissents from
those who make science the end, and sets it down.... In his Treatise of
Justice, however, he does not think that justice can be preserved, if
any one makes pleasure to be the end; but allows it may, if pleasure is
not said to be the end, but simply a good. Nor do I think that you need
now to hear me repeat his words, since his Third Book of Justice is
everywhere to be had. When, therefore, O my friend, they elsewhere say
that no one good is greater or less than another, and that what is
not the end is equal to the end, they contradict not only the common
conceptions, but even their own words.