BOOK III. VII. 36-VIII. 5
decent behaviour. You need not look for greater injuries than these.
CHAPTER VIII
How ought we to exercise ourselves to deal with the impressions of our senses?
As we exercise ourselves to meet the sophistical interrogations, so we ought also to exercise ourselves daily to meet the impressions of our senses, because these too put interrogations to us. So-and-so's son is dead. Answer, "That lies outside the sphere of the moral purpose, it is not an evil." His father has disinherited So-and-so; what do you think of it? "That lies outside the sphere of the moral purpose, it is not an evil." Caesar has condemned him. "That lies outside the sphere of the moral purpose, it is not an evil." He was grieved at all this. "That lies within the sphere of the moral purpose, it is an evil." He has borne up under it manfully. "That lies within the sphere of the moral purpose, it is a good." Now if we acquire this habit, we shall make progress; for we shall never give our assent to anything but that of which we get a convincing sense-impression.[1] His son is dead. What happened? 5His son is dead. Nothing else? Not a thing. His ship is lost. What happened? His ship is lost. He was carried off to prison. What happened? He was carried off to prison. But the observation: "He has fared ill," is an addition that
- ↑ The φαντασία καταληπτική, a term peculiar to Stoic psychology, is "an impression so distinct and vivid and consistent and permanent as to carry its own conviction of certainty and to be its own criterion of truth" (P. E. More, Hellenistic Philosophies, 85). See Bonhöffer, Epiktet und die Stoa, 160-7, 228-32. Among recent writers E. R. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, 36, renders the phrase "grasping impression"; G. Murray, The Stoic Philosophy, 27 and 44, "comprehensive sense-impression." Cf. R. M. Wenley, Stoicism, 87, for the metaphor in the adjective: "Conviction of truth must . . . involve an unshakable grip upon the actual."
