Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/47

1.] agreeable or disagreeable effect depends on our want or satiety, so in all our feelings pleasantness or painfulness was held to be caused, not by any property in the object producing them, but rather by our own condition at the time. From this it was inferred that a man's happiness or misery depends largely upon himself rather than upon external causes. We see from the account of Diogenes, that no Stoic could surpass the followers of Hegesias in contemptuous indifference with regard to the outward circumstances of life. What bearing has this theory of pleasure and pain on the chief peculiarity of Hegesiac doctrine? Though it does not clearly appear from the statement of Diogenes, this theory was probably regarded by the Hegesiacs as implying that, as pleasure can never be obtained without a previous pain, complete happiness is, in the very nature of the case, impossible; all happiness must be marred by the attendant pains which are its prerequisite conditions. At least, this is part of the reasoning which Plato, in the Philebus, bases on the same theory; and it does not appear why the theory should have been introduced at all in connection with Hegesiac doctrine, unless this was its drift.

But while this theory led Hegesias to assert a Stoical indifference to the value of external things, it did not carry him, like Theodorus, to the allied Stoical doctrine of the self-sufficiency of the wise man. The logical rigidity of a theory did not paralyze his mental vision so as to prevent him from seeing the fact, that pleasure and pain are determined, not solely by our subjective state, but by objective conditions as well. That is to say, even if our subjective state were wholly within our power, so that we might at will give ourselves pleasure without any alloy of pain, yet our pleasures and pains are also excited at times by causes which, as external, are entirely beyond our control. Of these causes Hegesias seems to have dwelt specially upon two. The first is the condition of the body, which is of course affected by the general forces of the physical world of which it forms a part. The other is the general current of events, directed, as it is, by causes which we are often unable, not only to foresee, but even to discover after they have operated, and