Miscellanies in Prose and Verse

I rejoice in the opportunity now afforded me to present to the liberal reader a specimen of that heroic virtue which was once taught in the porch Referring to the Stoa Poikile, the site of the Stoic school of philosophy. and the academy Referring to the school founded by Plato in Athens., and which its teachers once possessed as happily as they proclaimed it splendidly. The sentiments contained in the following dissertation * Nearly the whole of this dissertation is extracted from the writings of Seneca and Plotinus. are so truly sublime, and so calculated to raise man—even in his present degraded state—above the ordinary condition of humanity, that they evidently prove themselves to be the progeny of genuine philosophy and genuine religion, which always amicably and inseparably accompany each other.

In the example of Stilpo, which appears to me to be one of the most illustrious instances on record of magnanimous endurance, the reader will see an unequivocal proof of that doctrine held by the Stoics, Peripatetics The followers of Aristotle., and Platonists: that the true man is intellect, or the most excellent part of man; that the body is nothing more than the instrument of the rational soul; and that external possessions are, indeed, the good of the body, but are totally foreign to the exalted good of the mind.