It is to this moral reformation within the philosophical sphere that I wish especially to draw your attention. Its chief preacher was Epictetus. He was ranked among the Stoics; but his portrait of an ideal philosopher is the portrait of a Cynic.[235] In him, whether he be called Stoic or Cynic, the ethics of the ancient world find at once their loftiest expression and their most complete realization: and it will be an advantage, instead of endeavouring to construct a composite and comprehensive picture from all the available materials, to limit our view mainly to what Epictetus says, and, as far as possible, to let his sermons speak for themselves. The reformation affected chiefly two points: (1) the place of ethics in relation to philosophy and life; (2) the contents of ethical teaching. 1. The Stoics of the later Republic and of the age of the Cæsars had come to give their chief attention to logic and literature. The study of ethics was no longer supreme; and it had changed its character. Logic, which in the systems of Zeno and Chrysippus had been only its servant, was becoming its master: it was both usurping its place and turning it into casuistry. The study of literature, of what the great masters of philosophy had taught, was superseding the moral practice which such study was intended to help and foster. The Stoics of the time could construct ingenious fallacies and compose elegant moral discourses; but they were ceasing to regard the actual “living according to nature” as the main object of their lives. The revival of Cynicism was a re-assertion of the supremacy of ethics over logic, and of conduct over literary knowledge. It was at first crude and repulsive. If the Stoics were “the preachers of the _salon_,” the Cynics were “the preachers of the street.”[236] They were the mendicant friars of imperial times. They were earnest, but they were squalid. The earnestness was of the essence, the squalor was accidental. The former was absorbed by Stoicism and gave it a new impulse: the latter dropped off as an excrescence when Cynicism was tested by time. Epictetus was not carried as far as the Cynics were in the reaction against Logic. The Cynics would have postponed the study of it indefinitely. Moral reformation is more pressing, they said.[237] Epictetus holds to the necessity of the study of Logic as a prophylactic against the deceitfulness of arguments and the plausibility of language. But he deprecates the exaggerated importance which had come to be attached to it. The students of his day were giving an altogether disproportionate attention to the weaving of fallacious arguments and the mere setting of traps to catch men in their speech. He would restore Logic to its original subordination. Neither it nor the whole dogmatic philosophy of which it was the instrument was of value in itself. And moreover, whatever might be the place of such knowledge in an abstract system and in an ideal world, it was impossible to disregard the actual