Note 53 — Chapter X · ETHICS. THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE STOIC ETHICS. ABSTRACT THEORY OF MORALITY.

B. Emotions and virtue. (1) The emotions. (a) Their nature. However simple this state of things may be to a purely rational being, it must be remembered that man is not purely rational.53 He has, therefore, irrational as well as rational impulses.54 He is not originally virtuous, but he becomes virtuous by overcoming his emotions. Emotion or passion55 is a movement of mind contrary to reason and nature, an impulse transgressing the right mean.56 The Peripatetic notion, that certain emotions are in accordance with nature, was flatly denied by the Stoics.57 The seat of the emotions—and, indeed, of all impulses and every activity of the soul58—is man’s reason, the ἡγεμονικόν.59 Emotion is that state of the ἡγεμονικόν in which it is hurried into what is contrary to nature by excess of impulse. Like virtue, emotion is due to a change taking place simultaneously, not to the effect of a separate extraneous force.60 Imagination, therefore, alone calls it into being, as it does impulse in general.61 All emotions arise from faults in judgment, from false notions of good and evil, and may therefore be called, in so many words, judgments or opinions;62—avarice, for instance, is a wrong opinion as to the value of money,63 fear is a wrong opinion as regards future, trouble as regards present ills.64 Still, as appears from the general view of the Stoics respecting impulses,65 this language does not imply that emotion is only a theoretical condition. On the contrary, the effects of a faulty imagination—the feelings and motions of will, to which it gives rise—are expressly included in its conception;66 nor is it credible, as Galenus states,67 that this was only done by Zeno, and not by Chrysippus.68 The Stoics, therefore, notwithstanding their theory of necessity, did not originally assent to the Socratic dictum, that no one does wrong voluntarily.69 Younger members of the School may have used the dictum as an excuse for human faults,70 fearing lest, in allowing freedom to emotions, they should admit that they were morally admissible and give up the possibility of overcoming them.71 Nay more, as all that proceeds from the will and impulse is voluntary,72 so too emotions are also in our power; and it is for us to say, in the case of convictions out of which emotions arise, as in the case of every other conviction,73 whether we will yield or withhold assent.74 Just as little would they allow that only instruction is needed in order to overcome emotions; for all emotions arise, as they say, from lack of self-control,75 and differ from errors in that they assert themselves and oppose our better intelligence.76 How irregular and irrational impulses arise in reason was a point which the Stoics never made any serious attempt to explain.