Now the Stoics proceeded from them in this way—they changed the practical into the theoretical. They held that the _actual_ dispensing with everything that can be done without is not demanded, but that it is sufficient that we should regard possessions and pleasures constantly as _dispensable_, and as held in the hand of chance; for then the actual deprivation of them, if it should chance to occur, would neither be unexpected nor fall heavily. One might always have and enjoy everything; only one must ever keep present the conviction of the worthlessness and dispensableness of these good things on the one hand, and of their uncertainty and perishableness on the other, and therefore prize them all very little, and be always ready to give them up. Nay more, he who must actually dispense with these things in order not to be moved by them, thereby shows that in his heart he holds them to be truly good things, which one must put quite out of sight if one is not to long after them. The wise man, on the other hand, knows that they are not good things at all, but rather perfectly indifferent things, αδιαφορα, in any case προηγμενα. Therefore if they present themselves he will accept them, but yet is always ready to let them go again, if chance, to which they belong, should demand them back; for they are των ουκ εφ᾽ ἡμιν. In this sense, Epictetus, chap. vii., says that the wise man, like one who has landed from a ship, &c., will also let himself be comforted by a wife or a child, but yet will always be ready, whenever the captain calls, to let them go again. Thus the Stoics perfected the theory of equanimity and independence at the cost of the practice, for they reduced everything to a mental process, and by arguments, such as are presented in the first chapter of Epictetus, sophisticated themselves into all the amenities of life. But in doing so they left out of account that everything to which one is accustomed becomes a need, and therefore can only be given up with pain; that the will does not allow itself to be played with, cannot enjoy without loving the pleasures; that a dog does not remain indifferent if one draws a piece of meat through its mouth, and neither does a wise man if he is hungry; and that there is no middle path between desiring and renouncing. But they believed that they satisfied their principles if, sitting at a luxurious Roman table, they left no dish untasted, yet at the same time protested that they were each and all of them mere προηγμενα, not αγαθα; or in plain English, if they eat, drank, and were merry, yet gave no thanks to God for it all, but rather made fastidious faces, and persisted in boldly asserting that they gained nothing whatever from the whole feast. This was the expedient of the Stoics; they were therefore mere braggarts, and stand to the Cynics in much the same relation as well-fed Benedictines and Augustines stand to Franciscans and Capucines.