ENGLISH COMMENTARY
and improve himself above all other things, will refuse superfluous employments and reject all unprofitable thoughts and propositions. As folly, on the one side, though it should enjoy all it desire, would notwithstanding never be content; so, on the other, wisdom, acquiescing in the present, is never dissatisfied with itself.'
Ch. 9. We shall escape the wandering courses of ch. 7 if we remember that our nature is part of Universal Nature, and should be related to her, following her order and purposiveness. She has put it in our power (a truth which Epictetus loves to repeat) to do and say what is in accord with her, and none can hinder our will within the limits she prescribes.[1]
Ch. 10. This illustration from Theophrastus of the difference between faults due to anger and those due to appetite is out of place in this context. The only connexion with the subjects of the Book is that in ch. 16 Marcus puts anger down as one of the unsocial virtues and then mentions yielding to pleasure and pain. He says 'as we commonly do distinguish them' because the Stoic school strictly held that all vices are equally evil. The fragment has not been preserved elsewhere, but we can illustrate Theophrastus' meaning from Plato and Aristotle. Plato[2] remarks that we commonly reproach a man more who lacks self-control in the presence of pleasure than one who yields to pain. So Aristotle says that in common opinion want of control arising from anger is less culpable than that caused by appetite.[3] Anger, he goes on, hears the voice of reason in a sense, is accompanied by pain, is natural and undisguised. Appetite, on the contrary, follows at once the solicitation of sense, is pleasurable, unnatural in its excess, secret in pursuit of its end. Theophrastus emphasizes Aristotle's first two points. There is reason for anger, because the injury complained of was a precedent pain, and the pain accompanying anger proves that there is some compulsion upon the will. By contrast the victim of appetite acts of his own accord, at once and without reflection; he is carried away by the prospect of a pleasure which his imagination suggests. Moreover, appetite is less easy to correct and more effeminate, even as anger is more manly.
