Page:Discourses of Epictetus.djvu/173

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EPICTETUS.
119

wise he would not have been able to walk. And here then the matter stopped. For if he had also received the faculty of comprehending the use of appearances, it is plain that consistently with reason he would not then have beer. subjected to us, nor would he have done us these services, but he would have been equal to us and like to us.

Will you not then seek the nature of good in the rational animal? for if it is not there, you will not choose to say that it exists in any other thing (plant or animal). What then? are not plants and animals also the works of God? They are; but they are not superior things, nor yet parts of the Gods. But you are a superior thing; you are a portion separated from the deity; you have in yourself a certain portion of him. Why then are you ignorant of your own noble descent?[1] Why do you not know whence you came? will you not remember when you are eating, who you are who eat and whom you feed? When you are in conjunction with a woman, will you not remember who you are who do this thing? When you are in social intercourse, when you are exercising yourself, when you are engaged in discussion, know you not that you are nourishing a god, that you are exercising a god? Wretch, you are carrying about a god with you, and you know it not.[2] Do you think that I mean some God of

  1. Noble descent. See i. c. 9.
    The doctrine that God is in man is an old doctrine. Euripides said (Apud Theon. Soph. Progym.):—

    Ὁ νοῦς γὰρ ἡμῖν ἐστιν ἐν ἑκάστῳ Θεός.

    The doctrine became a common place of the poets (Ovid, Fast. vi.), 'Est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo;' and Horace, Sat. ii. 6, 79, 'Atque affigit humo divinae particulam aurae.' See i. 14, note 4.
  2. Mrs. Carter has a note here. 'See 1 Cor. vi. 19, 2 Cor. vi. 16, 2 Tim. i. 14, 1 John iii. 24, iv. 12, 13. But though the simple expression of carrying God about with us may seem to have some nearly parallel to it in the New Testament, yet those represent the Almighty in a more venerable manner, as taking the hearts of good men for a temple to dwell in. But the other expressions here of feeding and exercising God, and the whole of the paragraph, and indeed of the Stoic system, show the real sense of even its more decent phrases to be vastly different from that of Scripture.'
    The passage in 1 Cor. vi. 19 is, 'What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God and ye are not your own'? This follows v. 18, which is an exhortation to 'flee fornication.' The passage in 2 Cor. vi. 16 is 'And