It would be easy to cite passage after passage in which the great masters of Stoicism ring the changes on this idea, that the external thing, whether it be good or evil, cannot get into the fortified citadel of my mind, and therefore cannot touch me. Before it can touch me it must first be incorporated into my mind. In the very act of incorporation it undergoes a transformation, which in the perverse man may change the best external things into poison and bitterness; and in the sage is able to convert the worst of external facts into virtue, glory, and honour. Out of indifferent external matter, thinking makes the world in which we live; and if it is not a good world, the fault is, not with the indifferent external matters,--such as, to take Epictetus's enumeration of them, "wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, and pain, which lie between the virtues and the vices,"--but in our weak and erroneous thinking. III THE STOIC REVERENCE FOR UNIVERSAL LAW The first half of the Stoic doctrine is that we give our world the colour of our thoughts. The second half of Stoicism is concerned with what these thoughts of ours shall be. The first half of the doctrine alone would leave us in crude fantastic Cynicism,--the doctrine out of which the broader and deeper Stoic teaching took its rise. The Cynic paints the world in the flaring colours of his undisciplined, individual caprice. Modern apostles of the essential Stoic principle incline to paint the world in the roseate hues of a merely optional optimism. They want to be well, and happy, and serene, and self-satisfied; they think they are; and thinking makes them so. If Stoicism had been as superficial as that, as capricious, and temperamental, and individualistic, it would not have lasted as it has for more than two thousand years. The Stoic thought had substance, content, objective reality, as unfortunately most of the current phases of popular philosophy have not. This objective and universal principle the Stoic found in law. We must think things, not as we would like to have them, which is the optimism of the fabled ostrich, with its head in the sand; not in some vague, general phrases which mean nothing, which is the optimism of mysticism: but in the hard, rigid terms of universal law. Everything that happens is part of the one great whole. The law of the whole determines the nature and worth of the part. Seen from the point of view of the whole, every part is necessary, and therefore good,--everything except, as Cleanthes says in his hymn, "what the wicked do in their foolishness." The typical evils of life can all be brought under the Stoic formula, under some beneficial law; all, that is, except sin. That particular form of evil was not satisfactorily dealt with until the advent of Christianity.