Everything with the Stoic turns on the individual. _ta epi soi_, "the things in your own power," is the refrain of Epictetus' teaching. All is thrown upon the individual will, upon "the universal" working in the individual, according to Stoic theory, "upon me" the plain man would say. If the gods, as Seneca says, lend a hand to such as climb, the climber has to make his own way by temperance and fortitude. The "holy spirit within us" is after all hardly to be distinguished from conscience, intellect and will.[123] God, says Epictetus, ordains "if you wish good, get it from yourself."[124] Once the will (_proairesis_) is right, {66} all is achieved.[125] "You must exercise the will (_thelesai_)--and the thing is done, it is set right; as on the other hand, only fall a nodding and the thing is lost. For from within (_esothen_) comes ruin, and from within comes help."[126] "What do you want with prayers?" asks Seneca, "make yourself happy."[127] The old Stoic paradox about the "folly" of mankind, and the worthlessness of the efforts of all save the sage, was by now chiefly remembered by their enemies.[128] All this is due to the Stoic glorification of reason, as the embodiment in man of the Spermaticos Logos. Though Nous with the Stoics is not the pure dry light of reason, they tended in practice to distinguish reason from the emotions or passions (_pathe_), in which they saw chiefly "perturbations," and they held up the ideal of freedom from them in consequence (_apatheia_).[129] To be godlike, a man had to suppress his affections just as he suppressed his own sensations of pain or hunger. Every human instinct of paternal or conjugal love, of friendship, of sympathy, of pity, was thus brought to the test of a Reason, which had two catch-words by which to try them--the "Universe" and "the things in your own power"--and the sentence was swift and summary enough. They did not realize that for most men--and probably it is truest of the best men--Life moves onward with all its tender and gracious instincts, while Analysis limps behind. The experiment of testing affection and instinct by reason has often been tried, and it succeeds only where the reason is willing to be a constitutional monarch, so to say, instead of the despot responsible only to the vague concept of the Universe, whom the Stoics wished to enthrone. They talked of living according to Nature, but they were a great deal too quick in deciding what was Nature. If the centuries have taught us anything, it is to give Nature more time, more study and more respect than even yet we do. There are words {67} at the beginning of the thirteenth book of the "Prelude" wiser and truer than anything the Stoics had to say of her with their "excessive zeal" and their "quick turns of intellect." Carried away by their theories (none, we must remember as we criticize them, without some ground in experience and observation), the Stoics made solitude in the heart and called it peace.