considering the sort of body we have, with this atmosphere round us, and with these companions of our life, that different things of this kind should not befall different men.[405] “It is on this account that the philosophers rightly tell us that if a perfectly good man had foreknown what was going to happen to him, he would co-operate with nature in both falling sick and dying and being maimed, being conscious that this is the particular portion that is assigned to him in the arrangement of the universe, and that the whole is supreme over the part, and the city over the citizen.”[406] This Stoical solution, if the teleological conception which underlies it be assumed, may have been adequate as an explanation both of physical pain and of social inequality. But it was clearly inadequate as an explanation of misery and moral evil. And the sense of misery and moral evil was growing. The increased complexity of social life revealed the distress which it helped to create, and the intensified consciousness of individual life quickened also the sense of disappointment and moral shortcoming. The solution of the difficulties which these facts of life presented, was found in a belief which was correlative to the growing belief in the goodness of God, though logically inconsistent with the belief in the universality of His Providence. It was, that men were the authors of their own misery. Their sorrows, so far as they were not punitive or remedial, came from their own folly or perversity. They belonged to a margin of life which was outside the will of the gods or the ordinances of fate. The belief was repeatedly expressed by Homer, but does not appear in philosophy until the time of the Stoics: it is found in both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, and the latter also quotes it as a belief of the Pythagoreans.[407] Out of it came the solution of a problem not less important than that from which it had itself sprung. The conception that men were free to bring ruin upon themselves, led to the wider conception that they were altogether free. There emerged for the first time into prominence the idea which has filled a large place in all later theology and ethics, that of the freedom of the will. The freedom which was denied to external nature was asserted of human nature. It was within a man’s own power to do right or wrong, to be happy or miserable.