Note 164 — Chapter X · ETHICS. THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE STOIC ETHICS. ABSTRACT THEORY OF MORALITY.

(2) Universal depravity. This assertion is all the more trenchant because the Stoics recognised neither virtue nor wisdom outside their own system or one closely related to it, and because they took a most unfavourable view of the moral condition of their fellow-men. That they should do so was inevitable from their point of view. A system which sets up its own moral idea against current notions so sharply as that of the Stoics can only be the offspring of a thorough disapproval of existing circumstances, and must, on the other hand, contribute thereto. According to the Stoic standard, by far the majority, indeed, almost the whole of mankind, belong to the class of the foolish. If all foolish people are equally and altogether bad, mankind must have seemed to them to be a sea of corruption and vice, from which, at best, but a few swimmers emerge at spots widely apart.164 Man passes his life—such had already been the complaint of Cleanthes165—in wickedness. Only here and there does one, in the evening of life, after many wanderings, attain to virtue. And that this was the common opinion among the successors of Cleanthes, is witnessed by their constant complaints of the depravity of the foolish, and of the rare occurrence of a wise man.166