Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

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Seneca: His Character and Environment
are venial. Yet the fact that IK- at times acknowledges
a kind of moral weakness is perhaps the chief reason
why Seneca has been so often claimed as a Christian,
while no such claim has ever been made for Plutarch
\\lio sees no defects either in himself or bis
doctrine
The chief problem of philosophy has at all times
been, how to make the judgment supreme in all mat
ters that present themselves before the mind and how
to make the will carry out the decisions of the critical
faculty. When the poet says, Video meliora proboque,
Deteriora sequor,"
he is thinking of this irre
pressible conflict. Paul himself was not a stranger to
it, for he exclaims in a moment of self=abasement when
The good which
writing to Seneca s fellow citizens,
I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not,
that I practice/ He, too, finds within himself a
"law,"
a fact of human experience, that the flesh
wars against the spirit; that the appetencies are
hard
to reconcile with the judgment. Seneca s own writ
ings furnish abundant evidence that many who pro
fessed to be philosophers used their intellects solely,
or chiefly, in devising means for gratifying their de
sires. To men of his way of thinking the Epicureans
were a constant object of attack; yet the Epicureans
were generally consistent from their point of view
and in accordance with the postulates of their system.
The allsimportant question with every man who is in
the habit of giving an account to himself of his life
is how to get the most out of it,- how to formulate
a system of complete living. If the individual is the
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