Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶57 — Cicero (on the Stoics)

Cicero (on the Stoics), Tusculan Disputations 4 ¶57

Where, then, are they who say that anger has its use? Can madness be of any use? But still it is natural. Can anything be natural that is against reason? or how is it, if anger is natural, that one person is more inclined to anger than another? or that the lust of revenge should cease before it has revenged itself? or that anyone should repent of what he had done in a passion? as we see that Alexander the king did, who could scarcely keep his hands from himself, when he had killed his favorite Clytus, so great was his compunction. Now who that is acquainted with these instances can doubt that this motion of the mind is altogether in opinion and voluntary? For who can doubt that disorders of the mind, such as covetousness and a desire of glory, arise from a great estimation of those things by which the mind is disordered? from whence we may understand that every perturbation of the mind is founded in opinion. And if boldness—that is to say, a firm assurance of mind—is a kind of knowledge and serious opinion not hastily taken up, then diffidence is a fear of an expected and impending evil; and if hope is an expectation of good, fear must, of course, be an expectation of evil. Thus fear and other perturbations are evils. Therefore, as constancy proceeds from knowledge, so does perturbation from error. Now, they who are said to be naturally inclined to anger, or to pity, or to envy, or to any feeling of this kind: their minds are constitutionally, as it were, in bad health, yet they are curable, as the disposition of Socrates is said to have been. For when Zopyrus, who professed to know the character of everyone from his person, had heaped a great many vices on him in a public assembly, he was laughed at by others, who could perceive no such vices in Socrates. But Socrates kept him in countenance by declaring that such vices were natural to him, but that he had got the better of them by his reason. Therefore, as anyone who has the appearance of the best constitution may yet appear to be naturally rather inclined to some particular disorder, so different minds may be more particularly inclined to different diseases. But as to those men who are said to be vicious, not by nature, but their own fault, their vices proceed from wrong opinions of good and bad things, so that one is more prone than another to different motions and perturbations. But, just as it is in the case of the body, an inveterate disease is harder to be got rid of than a sudden disorder, and it is more easy to cure a fresh tumor in the eyes than to remove a defluxion of any continuance.