BOOK II. V. 23-27
others who meet you will congratulate you on your escape, but the man who knows how to observe such matters, if he sees that you have exhibited good form in this affair, will praise you and rejoice with you; but if he sees that you owe your escape to some dishonourable action, he will do the opposite. For where a man may rejoice with good reason, there others may rejoice with him.
How, then, can it be said that some externals are natural, and others unnatural? It is just as if we were detached from them.[1] For I will assert of the foot as such that it is natural for it to be clean, but if you take it as a foot, and not as a thing detached,[2] it will be appropriate for it to step into mud and trample on thorns and sometimes to be cut off for the sake of the whole body; otherwise it will no longer be a foot. 25We ought to hold some such view also about ourselves. What are you? A man. Now if you regard yourself as a thing detached, it is natural for you to live to old age, to be rich, to enjoy health. But if you regard yourself as a man and as a part of some whole, on account of that whole it is fitting for you now to be sick, and now to make a voyage and run risks, and now to be in want, and on occasion to die before your time. Why, then, are you vexed? Do you not know that as the foot, if detached, will no longer be a foot, so you too, if detached, will no longer be a man? For what is a man? A part of a state; first of that state which is made up of gods and men, and then of that which is said to be very close to the other, the state that is a small copy of the universal state. "Must I, then, be put on trial now?" Well, would you have someone else be sick of a fever now, some-
- ↑ That is, things which are natural for the part of a whole to endure, appear unnatural, if that same part regards itself as a separate and independent entity.
- ↑ That is, existing separate and per se.
