Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 1 Oldfather 1925.djvu/389

 to wealth your aversion and your desire: you will fail to get what you wish, and you will fall into what you would avoid. Give them to health; you will come to grief; so also if you give them to offices, honours, country, friends, children, in short to anything that lies outside the domain of moral purpose. But give them to Zeus and the other gods; entrust them to their keeping, let them exercise the control; let your desire and your aversion be ranged on their side—and how can you be troubled any longer? But if you show envy, wretched man, and pity, and jealousy, and timidity, and never let a day pass without bewailing yourself and the gods, how can you continue to say that you have been educated? What kind of education, man, do you mean? Because you have worked on syllogisms, and arguments with equivocal premisses? Will you not unlearn all this, if that be possible, and begin at the beginning, realizing that hitherto you have not even touched the matter; and for the future, beginning at this point, add to your foundations that which comes next in order—provision that nothing shall be that you do not wish, and that nothing shall fail to be that you do wish?

Give me but one young man who has come to school with this purpose in view, who has become an athlete in this activity, saying, "As for me, let everything else go; I am satisfied if I shall be free to live untrammelled and untroubled, to hold up my neck in the face of facts like a free man, and to look up to heaven as a friend of God, without fear of what may possibly happen." Let one of you show me such a person, so that I can say to him: Enter, young man, into your own, for it is your VOL. I.