Page:Encheiridion of Epictetus - Rolleston 1881.pdf/20

xiv Epictetus in his entirety, but who might be glad, nevertheless, to have a guide to plain living and high thinking which can find room in a traveller's knapsack or a sailor's chest.

The value of the Encheiridion, like that of every book which contains a revelation and a doctrine, must be tested, to a large extent at least, by the proveable reality of the facts which it declares and on which it builds. If these facts, in the case of Stoicism, are, as many seem to think, mere philosophic fancies, incapable of being widely verified in common experience, then let not all the lives which it has influenced and ennobled persuade us to take Stoicism, as a system, into any serious consideration. But is this so? or is not rather the main thesis of Stoicism a genuine and profound discovery of capacities which really exist in average humanity, and of paths which it can naturally and happily follow?

Without here noticing what is limited or mistaken in the teaching of the Encheiridion, let