n theory their principles with
the widest and most active benevolence, they could not wholly counteract
the practical evil of a system which declared war against the whole
emotional side of our being, and reduced human virtue to a kind of
majestic egotism; proposing as examples such men as Anaxagoras, who when
told that his son had died, simply observed, "I never supposed that I
had begotten an immortal," or as Stilpo, who when his country had been
ruined, his native city captured, and his daughters carried away as
slaves or as concubines, boasted that he had lost nothing, for the sage
is independent of circumstances. The framework or theory of benevolence
might be there, but the animating spirit was absent. Men who taught that
the husband or the father should look with perfect indifference on the
death of his wife or his child, and that the philosopher, though he may
shed tears of pretended sympathy in order to console his suffering
friend, must suffer no real emotion to penetrate his breast, could never
found a true or lasting religion of benevolence. Men who refused to
recognise pain and sickness as evils were scarcely likely to be very
eager to relieve them in others.

In truth, the Stoics, who taught that all virtue was conformity to
nature, were, in this respect, eminently false to their own principle.
Human nature, as revealed to us by reason, is a composite thing, a
constitution of many parts differing in kind and dignity, a hierarchy in
which many powers are intended to co-exist, but in different positions
of ascendency or subordination. To make the higher part of our nature
our whole nature is not to restore but to mutilate humanity, and this
mutilation has never been attempted without producing grave evils. As
philanthropists, the Stoics, through their passion for unity, were led
to the extirpation of those emotions which nature intended as the chief
springs of benevolence. As speculative philosophers, they were entangled
by the same desire in a long train of pitiable paradoxes. Their famous
doctrines that all virtues are equal, or, more correctly, are the same,
that all vices are equal, that nothing is an evil which does not affect
our will, and that pain and bereavement are, in consequence, no ills,
though partially explained away and frequently disregarded by the Roman
Stoics, were yet sufficiently prominent to give their teaching something
of an unnatural and affected appearance. Prizing only a single obje