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Who is in a state of progress, then? He who has best studied Chrysippus?Chrysippus was regarded as the highest authority among the later Stoics; but not one of his seven hundred volumes bas come down to posterity.—H. Why, does virtue consist in having read Chrysippus through? If so, progress is confessedly nothing else than understanding a great deal of Chrysippus; otherwise we confess virtue to consist in one thing, and declare progress, which is an approach to it, to be quite another thing.
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This person, they say, is already able to understand Chrysippus, by himself. Certainly, sir, you have made a vast improvement! What improvement? Why do you delude him? Why do you withdraw him from a sense of his real needs? Why do not you show him the real function of virtue, that he may know where to seek progress? Seek it there, O unfortunate, where your work lies. And where does your work lie? In learning what to seek and what to shun, that you may neither be disappointed of the one nor incur the other; in practising how to pursue and how to avoid, that you may not be liable to fail; in practising intellectual assent and doubt, that you may not be liable to be deceived. These are the first and most necessary things. But if you merely seek, in trembling and lamentation, to keep away all possible ills, what real progress have you made?
