Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/486

Rh Stoics held that if the wise man, in endeavouring to attain to perfect wisdom, that is, to make the divine will habitually his own, permitted any opposition to that will to exist within him, he acted absurdly. Again compare Adam Smith, p. 221: "A wise man never complains of the destiny of Providence and fate." There is, then, nothing so very paradoxical in the assertion that nothing can happen contrary to the will of the wise man: Christianity proclaims the same truth, and in terms equally emphatic.

11. Another paradox of the Stoics was that pain is no evil. To suppose that in this assertion they meant to maintain that pain is not painful, is not disagreeable, is not to be avoided, would be to do them grievous wrong. They merely meant to say that natural or physical pain was not moral evil, that calamity was not identical with wickedness, that there was a difference between sin and suffering. To the truly wise man of the Stoics there was no evil except moral evil; that is, except vice; that is, again, except some derangement either of a man's own system, or of the universal system, brought about by his own voluntary act. Pain might arise out of such derangement, but this pain was not itself evil; the evil lay in the derangement or rather in the voluntary act by which it had been brought about. The pain was the effect of the evil, but was not itself the evil: the evil was, as I have said, the derangement, and the act which produced it. Then, again, when