Note 15 — Chapter X · ETHICS. THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE STOIC ETHICS. ABSTRACT THEORY OF MORALITY.

A. The individual. (1) Importance attached to the individual. It was in keeping with the whole tone of the Stoic system to devote, in ethics, more attention to the conduct and duties of the individual than had been done by previous philosophy. Not that previous philosophers had altogether ignored this side. Indeed, Aristotle, in his investigations into individual virtue, had been led to enquire carefully into individual morality. Still, with Aristotle, the influence of classic antiquity on the border-land of which he stands was sufficiently strong to throw the individual into the background as compared with the community, and to subordinate ethics to politics. In the post-Aristotelian philosophy, this relation was exactly reversed. With the decline of public life in Greece, intellectual interest in the state declined also; and, in equal degree, the personality of the individual and circumstances of private life came into prominence. This feature may be already noticed in some of the older Schools, for instance, in the Academy and Peripatetic School. The Peripatetic, in particular, had, in the time of its first adherents, travelled far on the road which the founder had struck out. Among the Stoics, the same feature was required by the whole spirit of their system. If happiness depends upon man’s internal state and nothing external has power to affect it, the science which professes to lead man to happiness must primarily busy itself with man’s moral nature. It can only consider human society in as far as action for society forms part of the moral duty of the individual. Hence, in the Stoic philosophy, researches into the duties of the individual occupy a large space, and there is a corresponding subordination of politics. These duties form the subject of by far the greater part of the applied moral science of the Stoics; and it has been already set forth15 how minutely they entered in that study into possible details. At the same time, the scientific harvest resulting from these researches is by no means in proportion to their extent.