Note 21 — Chapter X · ETHICS. THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE STOIC ETHICS. ABSTRACT THEORY OF MORALITY.

(2) Cynicism of the Stoics. (a) Connection of Stoics with Cynics. More peculiar, and at the same time more startling, is another feature about the Stoics. Let not too much be made of the fact that they, under certain circumstances, permitted a lie.21 Were not Socrates and Plato, at least, of the same opinion? And, to be frank, we must admit that, although in this respect moral theories are strict enough, yet practice is commonly far too lax now. Very repulsive, however, are many assertions attributed to the Stoics, respecting the attitude of the wise man to the so-called intermediate things. Was not the very independence of externals, the indifference to everything but the moral state, which found expression in the doctrine of things indifferent and of the wise man’s apathy, at the root of that imperfection of life and principle which is so prominent in the Cynic School, the parent School of the Stoics? Granting that in the Stoic School this imperfection was toned down and supplemented by other elements, still the tendency thereto was too deeply rooted from its origin, and too closely bound up with its fundamental view of life, to be ever properly eradicated. It did not require, indeed, a Cynic life from its members; nay, more, it avowed that, except in rare cases, such a life ought not to be followed;22 still the Cynic’s life was its ideal; and when it asserted that it was not necessary for a wise man to be a Cynic, it implied that, if once a Cynic, he would always be a Cynic.23 Stoicism took for its patterns24 Antisthenes and Diogenes quite as much as Socrates; even those who held, with Seneca,25 that a philosopher ought to accommodate himself to prevailing customs, and, from regard to others, do what he would not himself approve, did not therefore cease to bestow their highest admiration on Diogenes’s independence of wants, notwithstanding his eccentricities.26 More consistent thinkers even approximated to Cynicism in their moral precepts,27 and in later times a School of younger Cynics actually grew out of the Stoic School.