Epictetus, Discourses
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Ed.

Of inconsistency.

Conversing therefore with such men, thus confused, thus ignorant what they say, and what are or are not their ills, whence they have them, and how they may be delivered from them, it is worth while, [p. 1197] I think, to ask one's self continually, "Am I too one of these? What do I imagine myself to be? How do I conduct myself, - as a prudent, as a temperate man? Do I, too, ever talk at this rate,- that I am sufficiently instructed for what may happen? Have I that persuasion that I know nothing which becomes one who knows nothing? Do I go to a master as to an oracle, prepared to obey; or do I also, like a mere driveller, enter the school only to learn and understand books which I did not understand before, or perhaps to explain them to others?"

You have been fighting at home with your manservant; you have turned the house upside-down, and alarmed the neighborhood; and do you come to me with a pompous show of wisdom, and sit and criticise how I explain a sentence, how I prate whatever comes into my head? Do you come, envious and dejected that nothing has come from home for you, and in the midst of the disputations sit thinking on nothing but how your father or your brother may treat you? "What are they saying about me at home? Now they think I am improving, and say, He will come back with universal knowledge. I wish I could learn everything before my return; but this requires much labor, and nobody sends me anything. The baths are very bad at Nicopolis; and things go very ill both at home and here."

After all this, it is said, nobody is the better for the philosophic school. Why, who comes to the school? [p. 1198] I mean, who comes to be reformed; who, to submit his principles to correction; who, with a sense of his wants? Why do you wonder, then, that you bring back from the school the very thing you carried there? For you do not come to lay aside, or correct, or change, your principles. How should you? Far from it. Rather consider this, therefore, whether you have not what you have come for. You have come to talk about theorems. Well; and are you not more impertinently talkative than you were? Do not these paltry theorems furnish you with matter for ostentation? Do you not solve convertible and hypothetical syllogisms? Why, then, are you still displeased, if you have the very thing for which you came?

"Very true; but if my child or my brother should die; or if I must die or be tortured myself, what good will these things do me? " Why, did.you come for this? Did you attend upon me for this? Was it upon any such account that you ever lighted your lamp, or sat up at night? Or did you, when you went into the walk, propose any delusive semblance to your own mind to be discussed, instead of a syllogism? Did any of you ever go through such a subject jointly? And after all, you say, theorems are useless. To whom? To such as apply them ill. For medicines for the eyes are not useless to those who apply them when and as they ought. Fomentations are not useless, dumb-bells are not useless: [p. 1199] but they are useless to some, and on the contrary, useful to others. If you should ask me, now, are syllogisms useful? I should answer that they are useful; and, if you please, I will show you how. "Will they be of service to me, then?" Why, did you ask, man, whether they would be useful to you, or in general? If any one in a dysentery should ask me whether acids be useful, I should answer, they are. "Are they useful for me, then?" I say, no. First try to get the flux stopped, and the ulceration healed. Do you too first get your ulcers healed, your fluxes stopped. Quiet your mind, and bring it free from distraction to the school; and then you will know what force there is in reasoning.