all the virtues. According to the teaching of his school virtue should be practiced because it leads to happiness; whereas the Stoics taught that virtue should be cultivated for her own sake, irrespective of the happiness it will ensure. Zeno (circa 370-260 B. C.), the founder of the Stoic philosophy, taught an ethical system according to which virtue consists in absolute judgment, absolute mastery of desire, absolute control of the soul over pain, and absolute justice. The keynote of the system is duty, as that of Epicureanism is pleasure. (Sir William Smith.)
In addition to the sects named above, there was still
another known as the Older Dogmatic School, which was
composed of men who had been the direct followers of the
great master, but who, forgetting altogether the practical
teachings of Hippocrates with regard to the importance
of experience, gave themselves up to all sorts of hypotheses
and theories. Among the names of the earliest followers
of this school one is astonished to find those of Thessalus
and Draco, the sons of Hippocrates, as well as the name
of Polybus, the latter's son-in-law. Diocles of Carystos
and Praxagoras of Cos, two of the most distinguished
men of that period, were also among the earliest members
of this dogmatic school. Diocles, who was one of the
Asclepiadae, owed his celebrity in part to his contributions
to our knowledge of anatomy and in part to the work which
he had done in other departments of medicine. Unfortunately,
all of these writings have been lost with the
exception of a few fragments which came to light toward
the middle of the nineteenth century. Praxagoras was also
one of the Asclepiadae. He was distinguished, as has
already been stated on an earlier page, by the fact that
he—and not Aristotle, as is sometimes stated—was first
to recognize the difference between arteries and veins, and
also by the further fact that he called attention to the
practical value of the pulse as an indication, in certain
diseases, of the tone of the patient's bodily condition or
vitality.
