HKB
We turn now to that department of the Stoic philosophy with which the reader of Epictetus is most concerned--its Ethics.
The ethical question resolves itself into a search for the supreme object of human endeavor, the Summum Bonum, the absolute and essential good. This, for the Stoic, embodied itself in the formula, "to live according to Nature." But what is Nature? The will of God, as revealed in the heart and conscience of those who seek to know it, and interpreted through the observation in a reverent and faithful spirit of the facts of life.
Going into the subject more precisely we find certain criteria of moral truth established, [Greek: prolepseis], as they were called, that is, primitive, original conceptions, or, as I have rendered them in my translation, "natural conceptions," dogmas by which all moral questions can be tried. If we inquire into the source of these [Greek: prolepseis], we shall find ourselves mistaken in our disposition to think that the Stoics regarded them as innate ideas. Innate they are not, for the Stoics held the soul at birth to be a tabula rasa, or blank page, which only experience could fill with character and meaning. But as Seneca says in his inquiry, "Quomodo ad nos prima boni honestique notitia pervenerit,"[5] although Nature alone could not teach us these things, could not equip us with the knowledge of them before we entered upon life, yet the "seeds" of this knowledge she does give us; the soul of every man has implanted in it a certain aptness or, indeed, necessity to deduce certain universal truths from such observation and experience as are common to all mankind; and these truths, the [Greek: prolepseis], though not strictly innate, have thus an inevitableness and dogmatic force not possessed by those which one man may reach and another miss in the exercise of the ordinary faculties, by argument, study, and so forth. By these natural conceptions the existence and character of God, and the general decrees of the moral law, are considered to be affirmed. If we inquire further how the Stoic explained the fact that some of these so-called inevitable and universal conclusions are denied in all sincerity by men like Epicurus, who were neither bad nor mad, we strike upon the difficulty which confronts all systems that aim at setting up any absolute body of truth, expressible in human language, in place of that partial, progressive, and infinitely varied revelation of God's mind and purpose to which the uncolored facts of the world's religious history seem to testify.