A Guide to Stoicism 6 ¶3 — St. George Stock (modern guide)

St. George Stock (modern guide), A Guide to Stoicism 6 ¶3

The Stoics did not owe much to the Peripatetics. There was too much balance about the master mind of Aristotle for their narrow intensity. His recognition of the value of the passions was to them an advocacy of disease in moderation: his admission of other elements besides virtue into the conception of happiness seemed to them to be a betrayal of the citadel, to say as he did that the exercise of virtue was the highest good was no merit in their eyes, unless it were added to the confession that there was none beside it. The Stoics tried to treat man as a being of pure reason. The Peripatetics would not shut their eyes to his mixed nature, and contended that the good of such a being must also be mixed, containing in it elements which had reference to the body and its environment. The goods of the soul indeed, they said, far outweighed those of body and estate, but still the latter had a right to be considered.