Ethics 247
burn and bruise flesh, of the animals which are equipped for hurting it;
it regards their appearance as hostile and threatening. These things are
closely connected; for as soon as each animal takes its safety to be conge-
nial, it seeks what will help it and fears what will harm it. There are
natural impulses to what is useful and natural rejections of the opposite.
Whatever nature teaches comes without any thought to enunciate it,
without planning. 22. Do you not see how sophisticated bees are in
building their hives, how much cooperation there is all round in the
division of the necessary tasks? Do you not see that the weaving of a
spider cannot be imitated by any mortal, [do you not see] how much
work it takes to arrange the threads-some set in a straight line as a kind
of framework, others spun in a circle to fill in the pattern, so that smaller
animals (for whose destruction such webs are woven) might be caught
and held as though in a net? 23. That craft is born, not learned. Therefore,
no one animal is any more skilled than any other; you will see that the
webs of spiders are all the same, the cells in all the corners of honeycombs
are all the same. What craft passes on is indefinite and uneven. What
nature distributes comes equally. She passes on nothing more than care
of oneself and skill in that, and that is also why they begin to live and
learn at the same time. 24. And it is not surprising that animals are born
with those things without which it would be pointless for them to be
born. Nature gave them this as their first tool for survival: congeniality
with and love for themselves. They could not have been safe if they did
not want to be; this would not have been beneficial all on its own, but
without it nothing else would have been either. But in no animal will
you find contempt for itself, nor even neglect; even silent and brutish
animals have the cunning required to live, although they are stupid in
all else. You will see that even animals which are useless to others do
not let themselves down.
Farewell.
Seneca Letters on Ethics 117.2-3 [11-108]
- Our school believes that the good is a body, because that which is
good acts and whatever acts is a body. What is good benefits [someone];
but for something to benefit [someone] it ought to act; and if it acts, it
is a body. They say that wisdom is good; it follows that it is also necessary
to say that it is corporeal 3. But being wise is not in the same category.
It is an incorporeal attribute of something else, viz. wisdom; consequently
it neither acts nor benefits [anyone]. 'What then?' he says, 'do we not
say that being wise is good?' We do say so, but only by reference to that
on which it depends, i.e., to wisdom itself.