Moral Letters to Lucilius

” I can relate to you many precepts of the ancients, unless you shrink back and it displeases you to learn minor cares.” But you do not shrink back, nor does any subtlety drive you away. It is not of your refinement to pursue such great matters carelessly. I approve of this, that you reduce all things to some progress, and are offended only when nothing is accomplished by the greatest subtlety. I shall strive that this does not happen even now. The question is raised, whether the good is comprehended by sense or by intellect? Connected to this is that it does not exist in mute animals and infants.

​Whoever place pleasure at the highest judge the good to be sensible, but we, on the contrary, judge it to be intelligible, who assign it to the mind. If the senses judged concerning the good, we would reject no pleasure, for there is none that does not attract, none that does not delight; and on the contrary, we would undergo no pain willingly, for there is none that does not offend the sense.

​Furthermore, those whom pleasure pleases too much and for whom the fear of pain is greatest would not be worthy of blame. And yet we disapprove of those addicted to gluttony and lust, and we despise those who, through fear of pain, will dare nothing manly. But what sin do they commit, if they obey the senses, that is, the judges of good and evil? For to these you have handed over the decision of desire and avoidance.

​But obviously reason has been placed over this matter; just as it decides concerning the happy life, concerning virtue, and concerning the honorable, so also it decides concerning the good and the evil. For among those people, the decision concerning the better part is given to the cheapest part, so that the sense pronounces on the good—a dull and blunt thing, and slower in man than in other animals.

​What if someone wished to discern minute things not with the eyes, but by touch? No sight is subtler or more intent than that of the eyes for this purpose, which would grant the power to discern good and evil. You see in how great an ignorance of the truth he is involved, and how on the ground he has cast down lofty and divine things, with whom touch judges concerning the highest, concerning the good and the evil. “Just as,” he says, “every science and art must have something manifest and comprehended by sense, from which it may arise and grow, so the happy life derives its foundation and beginning from manifest things and from that which falls under the sense.

​Surely you too say that the happy life takes its beginning from manifest things.”

​We say that those things are happy which are according to nature. But what is according to nature is clear and immediately apparent, just as what is sound. What is according to nature, which falls to one immediately born, I do not call a good, but the beginning of a good. You bestow the supreme good, pleasure, upon infancy, so that the newborn begins from that place where the perfected man arrives.

​You put the treetop in place of the root. If anyone should say that he who is latent in the maternal womb, of uncertain sex also, tender and imperfect and unformed, is already in some good, he would openly seem to err. And yet how little difference is there between him who is just now receiving life, and him who is a latent burden of the maternal womb? Both, as far as the understanding of good and evil is concerned, are equally immature, and an infant is no more capable of the good as yet than a tree or some mute animal. But why is there no good in a tree and a mute animal? Because there is no reason. For this reason, it is not in an infant either, for he also lacks it; he will arrive at the good only when he has arrived at reason. There is some irrational animal, there is some not yet rational, there is rational but imperfect; in none of these is the good, reason brings it with itself.