Page:Discourses of Epictetus.djvu/35

Rh of some artificer, and that it has not been constructed without a purpose. "Does then each of these things demonstrate the workman, and do not visible things and the faculty of seeing and light demonstrate him"? He then considers the constitution of man's understanding and its operations; and he asks, if this is not sufficient to convince us, let people "explain to us what it is that makes each several thing, or how it is possible that things so wonderful and like the contrivances of art should exist by chance and from their own proper motion"?

It is enough for animals to do what their nature leads them to do without understanding why they do it. But it is not enough for us to whom God has given also the intellectual faculty; for unless we act conformably to the nature and constitution of each thing, we shall never attain our true end. God has introduced man into the world to be a spectator of God and his works; and not only a spectator of them, but an interpreter. For this reason, he says, "it is shameful for man to begin and to end where irrational animals do; but rather he ought to begin where they begin, and to end where nature ends in us; and nature ends in contemplation and understanding, and in a way of life conformable to nature" (p. 21). He examines in another chapter (i. c. 9), How from the fact that we are akin to God, a man may proceed to the consequences. Here he shows that a man who has observed with intelligence the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God came all beings which are produced on the earth, and particularly rational beings who are by reason conjoined with him,—"why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world, why not a son of God, and why should he be afraid of anything which happens among men?—when you have God for your maker, and father, and guardian, shall not this release us from sorrows and fears?"