Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
(1) I could give you many maxims of the ancients,
if you did not shrink from them and find it tiresome to learn such fine-grained matters.
But you do not shrink from them, and no subtlety drives you off: it is not in keeping with your refinement to chase only after grand themes -- indeed I approve of the fact that you bring everything back to some practical gain, and that you are put off only when the utmost subtlety accomplishes nothing. That is not what I shall be doing now, at any rate.
The question is whether the good is grasped by sense-perception or by intellect; bound up with this is the claim that it is not present in dumb animals and infants. (2) Whoever puts pleasure at the summit judges the good to be something perceptible by the senses; we, on the contrary, hold it to be an object of intellect, something we assign to the mind. If the senses judged what is good, we would reject no pleasure; for there is none that does not entice, none that does not delight; and conversely we would willingly undergo no pain, for there is none that does not offend the senses. (3) Besides, people who are excessively fond of pleasure and who fear pain above all else would not deserve blame. And yet we do condemn those enslaved to gluttony and lust, and we despise the spineless who, out of fear of pain, will never dare to act like men. But what wrong are they doing, if they obey the senses -- the very judges, on your view, of good and evil? For it is to the senses that you have handed over the decision of what to seek and what to flee. (4) But of course reason has been set in charge of this matter: just as it settles questions about the happy life, about virtue, about what is honorable, so too it settles questions about good and evil. Among your opponents, though, the verdict on the better course is entrusted to the meanest part -- so that sense-perception pronounces on the good, a dull and blunted thing, and slower in a human being than in other animals. (5) What if someone wanted to distinguish fine details not with the eyes but by touch? No sense is more refined or more attentive than sight for telling good from bad. See in what deep ignorance of the truth a man is caught, and how low he drags things sublime and divine, when he lets touch pronounce judgment on the highest good and evil. (6) 'Just as,' he says, 'every branch of knowledge and every art must have something evident and grasped by sense from which it arises and grows, so too the happy life takes its foundation and its starting point from what is evident, from what falls under the senses. Surely you yourselves say that the happy life takes its beginning from what is evident.' (7) We say that things are happy which accord with nature; but what accords with nature is plain and obvious at once, just as it is plain what a whole, uninjured thing is. What accords with nature, what befalls a being the instant it is born, I do not call the good, but the beginning of the good. You, however, hand over the highest good, pleasure, to infancy, so that the newborn should start out at the very point the fully developed human being arrives at; you are putting the treetop where the root should be. (8) If someone said that a being still hidden in the mother's womb, of uncertain sex even, tender and unformed and incomplete, is already in possession of some good, he would clearly seem to be mistaken. And yet how little difference is there between one who has just this moment received life and one who still lies hidden as a burden in the maternal womb? Both, as far as understanding of good and evil goes, are equally unripe, and the infant is no more capable of the good at this point than a tree or some dumb animal. Why is there no good in a tree or a dumb animal? Because there is no reason in them. For this same cause there is none in the infant either; for reason is lacking in the infant too. It will arrive at the good only when it arrives at reason. (9) There is an animal without reason, there is one not yet possessed of reason, there is one that has reason but imperfectly: in none of these is the good present -- reason itself brings the good with it. What, then, is the difference between them you may ask? In the one that is without reason, the good will never be present; in the one not yet possessed of reason, it cannot yet be present; in the one that has reason, but imperfectly, the good is now possible, but is not yet actual. (10) So I say, Lucilius: the good is not found in just any body, at just any age, and it is as far removed from infancy as the last is from the first, as the finished is from the beginning; therefore it is not present in the tender little body still just coalescing. Why should it not be? No more than it is present in the seed. (11) Put it this way: we recognize some good proper to a tree or a planted crop -- this is not present in the first shoot that has just now broken through the soil. There is some good proper to wheat -- this is not yet present in the milky blade, nor when the soft ear pushes its way out of the husk, but only when summer and due ripeness have brought the grain to fullness. Just as every nature brings forth its own good only when it has reached completion, so the good proper to man is not present in man until reason in him is perfected. (12) But what is this good? I will tell you: a free and upright mind, one that subjects all else to itself and itself to nothing. Infancy is so incapable of receiving this good that childhood cannot even hope for it, and adolescence hopes for it only presumptuously; it is well managed if old age, through long and intent effort, arrives at it. If this is the good, then it is an object of intellect. (13) 'You have said,' he objects, 'that there is some good proper to a tree, some good proper to a plant; therefore there can also be some good proper to an infant.' But the true good is present neither in trees nor in dumb animals: what is called good in them is called good only by courtesy. 'What is it, then?' you ask. It is that which accords with each thing's own nature. But the good cannot possibly fall to a dumb animal; it belongs to a happier and better nature. Only where there is room for reason is there room for the good. (14) There are these four natures: that of the tree, of the animal, of man, of god. The latter two, which possess reason, share the same nature; they differ in this, that the one is immortal, the other mortal. Of these, then, nature itself brings one -- god's, of course -- to perfection; effort brings the other, man's, to perfection. The rest are perfect only within the limits of their own kind, not truly perfect, since reason is absent from them. For that alone is truly perfect which is perfect according to universal nature, and universal nature is rational; the rest can only be perfect within their own particular kind. (15) In that which cannot possess the happy life, neither can there be present that by which the happy life is achieved; and the happy life is achieved by goods. In the dumb animal there is no happy life, nor is there present that by which the happy life is achieved: in the dumb animal there is no good. (16) The dumb animal grasps by sense only what is present; it recalls the past only when it happens upon something that jogs the senses -- as a horse recalls the road when it is brought to its starting point. In the stable, though, it has no sense of any road at all, however often it has trodden it and however fresh the memory. But the third time, the future, has no bearing on dumb creatures at all. (17) How, then, can the nature of beings be thought perfect when they have no use of a complete span of time? For time consists of three parts -- past, present, future. To animals is given only the briefest part, granted in mere passing, the present: memory of the past is rare, and is never recalled except when jogged by the encounter with something present. (18) The good proper to a perfect nature cannot, then, be present in an imperfect nature; or if such a nature does possess it, then plants possess it too. Nor do I deny that toward things that appear to accord with nature, dumb animals show great and vehement impulses -- but disordered and turbulent ones; and the good is never disordered or turbulent. (19) 'What, then,' you say, 'do dumb animals move about in a disturbed and disordered way?' I would say they move in a disturbed and disordered way if their nature were capable of order: as it is, they move in accordance with their own nature. For 'disturbed' properly describes something that is capable, at some time, of being undisturbed; 'anxious' describes something that can be free of care. No creature has a fault unless it is also capable of virtue: the motion dumb animals display arises from their nature as it is. (20) But not to keep you too long: there will be some good in a dumb animal, some virtue, something complete -- but neither the good absolutely, nor virtue, nor completeness. These belong to rational beings alone, to whom alone it is given to know why, to what extent, and how. So the good exists nowhere except where reason exists. (21) You ask what this whole discussion is aiming at, and what good it will do your mind. I will tell you: it exercises the mind, sharpens it, and in any case keeps it occupied with something worthy while it is bound to be busy with something. It also helps by delaying those who are rushing toward what is base. But I will say this too: there is no way I can do you more good than by showing you your own good, by separating you from dumb animals, by placing you beside god. (22) . (23) Will you not, then, leave behind those contests in which you are bound to be defeated, so long as you strain after things that are not your own, and turn back to the good that is truly yours? What is this good? A mind, of course, corrected and pure, a rival of god, lifting itself above human concerns, placing nothing of itself outside itself. You are a rational animal. What, then, is the good in you? Perfected reason. Summon this out toward its own proper end, and let it grow to the greatest extent it can. (24) Judge yourself happy only when every joy will be born in you from yourself, when, looking at the things men seize, pray for, and guard, you find nothing -- I do not say that you would prefer, but that you would even wish for. I will give you a brief measure by which to gauge yourself, by which to know that you are already perfect: you will possess what is your own only when you understand that the most fortunate of men are in fact the most wretched. Farewell.