Book 1
4
This person, they say, is already able to understand Chrysippus, by himself. Certainly, sir, you have made a vast improvement! What improvement? Why do you delude him? Why do you withdraw him from a sense of his real needs? Why do not you show him the real function of virtue, that he may know where to seek progress? Seek it there, O unfortunate, where your work lies. And where does your work lie? In learning what to seek and what to shun, that you may neither be disappointed of the one nor incur the other; in practising how to pursue and how to avoid, that you may not be liable to fail; in practising intellectual assent and doubt, that you may not be liable to be deceived. These are the first and most necessary things. But if you merely seek, in trembling and lamentation, to keep away all possible ills, what real progress have you made?
4
Show me then your progress in this point. As if I should say to a wrestler, Show me your muscle; and he should answer me, See my dumb-bells. Your dumb-bells are your own affair; I desire to see the effect of them.
4
Take the treatise on the active powers, and see how thoroughly I have perused it.
4
I do not inquire into this, O slavish man, but how you exert those powers, how you manage your desires and aversions, your intentions and purposes, how you meet events,—whether in accordance with nature’s laws or contrary to them. If in accordance, give me evidence of that, and I will say you improve; if the contrary, you may go your way, and not only comment on these treatises, but write such yourself; and yet what service will it do you? Do not you know that the whole volume is sold for five denarii? Does he who comments upon it, then, value himself at more than that sum? Never make your life to lie in one thing and yet seek progress in another.
4
Where is progress, then?
