20 The words employed by the Stoics to indicate specific duties, as presented to the common understanding, recognize intrinsic fitness as the ground of right. These duties are termed in Greek, καθήκοντα, that is, _be-fitting_, and in Latin, _officia_, from _ob_ and _facio_, that which is done _ob aliquid_, for some assignable reason. 21 How far Seneca’s character was represented by his philosophy is, we believe, a fairly open question. That the beginning and the close of his career were in accordance with his teachings, is certain. That as a courtier, he was in suspicious proximity to, if not in complicity with, gross scandals and crimes, is equally certain. The evidence against him is weighty, but by no means conclusive. He may have lingered in the purlieus of the palace in fond memory of what Nero had been in the promise of his youth, and in the groundless hope of bringing him again under more humane influences. This supposition is rendered the more probable by the well-known fact, that during his whole court life, and notwithstanding his great wealth, Seneca’s personal habits were almost those of an anchorite. 22 Spinoza’s ethical system was closely parallel to that of Hobbes. He denied the intrinsic difference between right and wrong; but he regarded _aristocracy_ as the natural order of society. With him, as with Hobbes, virtue consists solely in obedience to constituted authority; and so utterly did he ignore a higher law, that he maintained it to be the right of a state to abjure a treaty with another state, when its terms ceased to be convenient or profitable. 23 Price’s theory of morals is developed with singular precision and force in one of the Baccalaureate Addresses of the late President Appleton, of Bowdoin College. 24 Εὐτόπος. 25 The reader who is conversant with the literature of ethics in England and America will miss in this chapter many names which merit a place by the side of those that have been given. But within the limits proposed for this manual, the alternative was to select a few writers among those who have largely influenced the thought of their own and succeeding times, and to associate with each of them something that should mark his individuality; or to make the chapter little more than a catalogue of names. The former is evidently the more judicious course. Nothing has been said of living writers,—not because there are none who deserve an honored place among the contributors to this department of science, but because, were the list to be once opened, we should hardly know where to close it.