perfection. By keeping in mind these two factors, the limit and the passion, as the constituents of happiness, and by considering that the Stoics make the former, and the Epicureans the latter, to be the essential ingredient, you will obtain, I think, a sufficiently clear conception of their respective doctrines in regard to happiness. This view at least seems to me to lay open the fundamental difference of the two doctrines.
28. To illustrate this difference, you may suppose a dispute to arise as to whether the matter or the form of a statue be the more essential of the two in the composition of the statue. One man might argue that the matter, the marble, was the essential and primary element; that the form, the limit, was the secondary and accidental factor. Another man might argue that the form, the limiting outline, was the essential, and that the matter, the marble, was the non-essential, element. So in regard to happiness. Is it the matter, the passions and their indulgence, is it this that makes us happy? or do we owe our happiness to the form, the limit, the restraint by which our passions are controlled? Epicurism contends for the first of these positions, Stoicism argues in favour of the second.
29. I cannot but think that the Stoical doctrine has here a great advantage over the Epicurean, in being founded on a deeper and truer insight into the
