Sale of Creeds (20-21)

Call the next lot. Stoicism; the creed of the sorrowful countenance, the close-cropped creed.

Ah yes, several customiers, I fancy, are on the look-out for him. Virtue incarnate! The very quintessence of creeds! Who is for universal monopoly?

How are we to understand that?

Why, here is monopoly of wisdom, monopoly of beauty, monopoly of courage, monopoly of justice. Sole king, sole orator, sole legislator, sole millionaire.

And I suppose sole cook, sole tanner, sole carpenter, and all that?

Presumably.

Regard me as your purchaser, good fellow, and tell me all about yourself. I dare say you think it rather hard to be sold for a slave?

Not at all. These things are beyond our control. And what is beyond our control is indifferent.

I don’t see how you make that out.

What! Have you yet to learn that of indifferentia some are praepostta and others rejecta?

Still I don’t quite see.

No; how should you? You are not familiar with our terms. You lack the comprebensio vist. The earnest student of logic knows this and more than this. He understands the nature of subject, predicate, and contingent, and the distinctions between them.

Now in Wisdom’s name, tell me, pray, what is a predicate? what is a contingent? ‘There is a ring about those words that takes my fancy.

With all my heart. A man lame in one foot knocks that foot accidentally against a stone, and gets a cut. Now the man is subject to lameness; which is the predicate. And the cut is a contingency.