Page:Encheiridion of Epictetus - Rolleston 1881.pdf/33

PREFACE. perience in life, that I do not think he could have meant to present it, in the cases where we most need its aid, as a mere anodyne. For an anodyne is of no positive benefit in itself, being merely the annihilation of experience; while to master the pain, to recognise that through it we are more fitted to be helpful, to let it strengthen and deepen our sense of the reality of things, is to have made it a blessing. But that it should be so it is needful to have felt it as a pain. Now, note that Epictetus does not say, 'If your wife or child should die, you are not to be grieved.' He says 'you are not to be confounded,'. There is a kind of grief (who has not seen it?) which is really a self-indulgence, which is mingled with something like pride in its own intensity and absorbingness, and in the paralysis and confusion it causes. This is barren grief, the grief which Epictetus scorned. But there is another grief, which I think he was far from scorning, in which suffering is not allowed to isolate