BOOK II. XXII. 36-XXIII. 3
or is making a mistake in things of the greatest importance; he will not be harsh with anybody, because he knows well the saying of Plato, that "every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth."[1] But if you fail to do this, you may do everything else that friends do—drink together, and share the same tent, and sail on the same ship—and you may be sons of the same parents; yes, and so may snakes! But they will never be friends and no more will you, as long as you retain these brutish and abominable judgements.
CHAPTER XXIII
Of the faculty of expression
Everyone would read with greater pleasure and ease the book that is written in the clearer characters. Therefore everyone would also listen with greater ease to those discourses that are expressed in appropriate and attractive language. We must not, therefore, say that there is no faculty of expression, for this is to speak both as an impious man and as a coward. As an impious man, because one is thereby disparaging the gifts received from God, as though one were denying the usefulness of the faculty of vision, or that of hearing, or that of speech itself. Did God give you eyes to no purpose, did He to no purpose put in them a spirit[2] so strong and so cunningly devised that it reaches out to a great distance and fashions the forms of whatever
- ↑ Cf. I. 28, 4.
- ↑ In Stoic physiology the spirit of vision connected the central mind with the pupil of the eye, and sight was produced by the action of this spirit upon external objects, not by the passive reception of rays. See L. Stein, Psychologie der Stoa (1886), 127-9; Erkenntnistheorie der Stoa (1888), 135 f.; A. Bonhöffer, Epiktet und die Stoa (1890), 123; and for the origins of this general theory, J. I. Beare, Greek Theories of elementary Cognition (1906), 11 ff.
