The Stoics,
who carried the suppression of the emotions farther than any other
school, laboured with great zeal to compensate the injury thus done to
the benevolent side of our nature, by greatly enlarging the sphere of
reasoned and passionless philanthropy. They taught, in the most emphatic
language, the fraternity of all men, and the consequent duty of each man
consecrating his life to the welfare of others. They developed this
general doctrine in a series of detailed precepts, which, for the range,
depth, and beauty of their charity, have never been surpassed. They even
extended their compassion to crime, and adopting the paradox of Plato,
that all guilt is ignorance, treated it as an involuntary disease, and
declared that the only legitimate ground of punishment is prevention.
But however fully they might recognise in 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.
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