se and God. Epictetus says,
that we can accommodate ourselves cheerfully to the providence that
rules the world, if we possess two things--the power of seeing all that
happens in the proper relation to its own purpose--and a grateful
disposition. The work of Antoninus is full of studies of Nature in the
devout spirit of 'passing from Nature up to Nature's God;' he is never
weary of expressing his thorough contentment with the course of natural
events, and his sense of the beauties and fitness of everything. Old
age has its grace, and death is the becoming termination. This high
strain of exulting contemplation reconciled him to that complete
submission to whatever might befall, which was the essential feature of
the 'Life according to Nature,' as he conceived it.

IV.--The Stoical theory of Virtue is implicated in the ideas of the
Good, now described.

The fountain of all virtue is manifestly the life according to nature;
as being the life of subordination of self to more general
interests--to family, country, mankind, the whole universe. If a man is
prepared to consider himself absolutely nothing in comparison with the
universal interest, and to regard it as the sole end of life, he has
embraced an ideal of virtue of the loftiest order. Accordingly, the
Stoics were the first to preach what is called 'Cosmopolitanism;' for
although, in their reference to the good of the whole, they confounded
together sentient life and inanimate objects--rocks, plants, &c.,
solicitude for which was misspent labour--yet they were thus enabled to
reach the conception of the universal kindship of mankind, and could
not but include in their regards the brute creation. They said: 'There
is no difference between the Greeks and Barbarians; the world is our
city.' Seneca urges kindness to slaves, for 'are they not men like
ourselves, breathing the same air, living and dying like ourselves?'

The Epicureans declined, as much as possible, interference in public
affairs, but the Stoic philosophers urged men to the duties of active
citizenship. Chrysippus even said that the life of philosophical
contemplation (such as Aristotle preferred, and accounted godlike) was
to be placed on the same level with the life of pleasure; though
Plutarch observes that neither Chrysippus nor Zeno ever meddled
personally with any public duty; both of them passed their lives in
lecturing and writing. The truth is that both of them were foreigners
residing at Athens