and inflated by it. For by what means could one persuade a young man who excels in these matters, that he ought not to become an appendage to them, but to make them an appendage[1] to himself? Does he not trample on all such reasons, and strut before us elated and inflated, not enduring that any man should reprove him and remind him of what he has neglected and to what he has turned aside?
What then was not Plato a philosopher?[2] I reply, and was not Hippocrates a physician? but you see how Hippocrates speaks. Does Hippocrates then speak thus in respect of being a physician? Why do you mingle things which have been accidentally united in the same men? And if Plato was handsome and strong, ought I also to set to work and endeavour to become handsome or strong, as if this was necessary for philosophy, because a certain philosopher was at the same time handsome and a philosopher? Will you not choose to see and to distinguish in respect to what men become philosophers, and what things belong to them in other respects? And if I were a philosopher, ought you also to be made lame?[3] What then? Do I take away these faculties which you possess? By no means; for neither do I take away the faculty of seeing. But if you ask me what is the good of man, I cannot mention to you anything else than that it is a certain disposition of the will with respect to appearances.[4]
- ↑ A man, as Wolf explains it, should not make oratory, or the art of speaking, his chief excellence. He should use it to set off something which is superior.
- ↑ Plato was eloquent, and the adversary asks, if that is a reason for not allowing him to be a philosopher. To which the rejoinder is that Hippocrates was a physician, and eloquent too, but not as a physician.
- ↑ Epictetus was lame.
- ↑ In i. 20, 15. Epictetus defines the being (οὐσία) or nature of good to be a proper use of appearances; and he also says, i. 29, 1, that the nature of the good is a kind of will (προαίρεσις ποιά), and the nature of evil is a kind of will. But Schweighaeuser cannot understand how the "good of man" can be "a certain will with regard to appearances;" and he suggests that Arrian may have written, "a certain will which makes use of appearances."
