Page:Discourses of Epictetus volume 1 Oldfather 1925.djvu/455

 "What then," says an objector, "if the matter stands like this, and it is possible for that which serves to be superior to what it serves—the horse to the rider, or the dog to the hunter, or his instrument to the harper, or his servants to the king?" Well, what faculty is it that uses the services of the rest in this way? Moral purpose. What is it that attends to everything? Moral purpose. What is it that destroys the whole man, sometimes by hunger, sometimes by a noose, sometimes by hurling him over a cliff? Moral purpose. Is there, then, anything stronger than this among men? Yet how can the things that are subject to hindrance be stronger than that which is unhindered? What are by their very nature capable of hindering the faculty of vision? Both moral purpose and things that lie outside its sphere. The same hinder visionhearing [sic]; and so it is also with speech. But what is by its very nature capable of hindering moral purpose? Nothing that lies outside its sphere, but only itself when perverted. For this reason moral purpose becomes the only vice, or the only virtue.

Therefore, since it is so great a faculty and has been set over everything else, let it come before us and say that the flesh is of all things the most excellent. Nay, even if the flesh itself called itself most excellent, one would not have tolerated such a statement. But now what is it, Epicurus, that makes such a declaration? that composed the treatise On the End, or The Physics, or On the Standard? 411