e precedence, but
reason; with which it is more convenient to live, though we shall be
fools." First therefore he says that vice and things participating
of vice are evil, and that nothing else is so. Now vice is something
reasonable, or rather depraved reason. For those therefore who are fools
to live with reason, is nothing else but to live with vice. Thence to
live being fools is to live being unhappy. In what then is this to be
preferred to indifferent things? For he surely will not say that with
regard to happiness unhappiness is to be preferred. But neither, say
they, does Chrysippus altogether think that the remaining in life is to
be reckoned amongst good things, or the going out of it amongst bad; but
both of them amongst indifferent ones, according to Nature. Wherefore
also it sometimes becomes meet for the happy to make themselves
away, and again for the unhappy to continue in life. Now what greater
repugnance can there be than this in the choice and avoiding of things,
if it is convenient for those who are in the highest degree happy to
forsake those good things that are present, for the want of some one
indifferent thing? And yet they esteem none of the indifferent things
either desirable or to be avoided; but only good desirable, and only
evil to be avoided. So that it comes to pass, according to them, that
the reasoning about actions regards neither things desirable nor things
refusable; but that aiming at other things, which they neither shun nor
choose, they make life and death to depend on these.

Chrysippus confesses that good things are totally different from bad;
and it must of necessity be so, if these make them with whom they are
present miserable to the very utmost point, and those render their
possessors in the highest degree happy. Now he says, that good and evil
things are sensible, writing thus in his First Book of the End: "That
good and evil things are perceptible by sense, we are by these reasons
forced to say; for not only the passions, with their species, as sorrow,
fear, and such others, are sensible; but we may also have a sense of
theft, adultery, and the like, and generally, of folly, cowardice, and
other vices not a few; and again, not only of joy, beneficence, and many
other dependences on good deeds, but also of prudence, fortitude,
and the other virtues." Let us pass by the other absurdities of these
things; but that they are repugnant to those things which are delivered
by him c