Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

in 3 STOIC DOGMA Ixxi
with the superior check which puts man on a higher
plane. In man, impulses and affections are not of
necessity irrational ; on this point the language of
Chrysippus and others is unmistakable. Strictly speak-
ing, they are in themselves non-rational, but capable
of adoption by the reason, and so of becoming
rationalised. But there is a constant tendency among
the zealots and rhetoricians of the school to press the
verbal antithesis, to decry all forms of emotion as aber-
rations from right reason, and to exact from the Wise
Man their entire eradication. The question is at
bottom one of terms. It is possible to confine the
terms emotion, desire, and the like to those unauthorised
affections and impulses, which are not incorporated by
the directive power and so raised into constituent
parts of virtue or right reason. On that understanding
the doctrine of Apathy (d-jrdOeia) may be pressed without
reserve, and the emotions treated as suspects or detected
criminals ; but the restriction is arbitrary and misleading,
as at variance with psychological fact. The emotions
and affections do not change their nature in receiving
sanction and adoption from the reason and the will ;
and Stoicism lost much in moral efficacy by obscuring
and even denying this psychological fact, and extending
its disapproval of irrational (or unrationalised) emotions
into a wholesale and undiscriminating ban.
Sensation is treated on the same lines ; the five
senses, often grouped as a single faculty of soul, are
thought of as outlying feelers, so to speak, of the Pneuma,
directed from the centre to the surface of the body,
and maintaining communication between the conscious