On the other hand one man is made grateful for the wealth he has been able to accumulate. Another is made more sympathetic. Another is made generous. Another is urged into the larger public service his independent means makes possible. Another is lifted up into a sense of responsibility for its right use. On the whole the men and women who earn their money honestly are usually affected in one or more of these beneficial ways, and their wealth becomes an enrichment of their personality.
Now it is impossible that this hundred thousand dollars should get into any man's mind, and become a mental state, without its being mixed with one or other of these mental, emotional, and volitional accompaniments. The mental state, in other words, is a compound, of which the external fact, in this case the hundred thousand dollars, is the least important ingredient. It is so unimportant a factor that the Stoics pronounced it indifferent. The tone and temper in which we accept our riches, the ends to which we devote them, the spirit in which we hold them, the way in which we spend them, are so vastly more important than the mere fact of having them, that by comparison, the fact itself seems indifferent. Like all strong statements, this is doubtless an exaggeration. You cannot have just the same mental state without riches that you can have with them. The external fact is a factor, though a relatively small one, in the composite mental state. The virtues of a rich man are not precisely the same as the virtues of a poor man. Yet the Stoic paradox is very much nearer the truth than the statement of the average man, that external things are the whole, or even the most important part of our mental states.
The same thing is true of health and sickness. Health often makes one careless, insensitive, negligent of duty; while sickness often makes one conscientious, considerate, faithful, and thus more useful and efficient than his healthy brother. Popularity often puffs up with pride; while persecution, by humbling, prepares the heart for truer blessedness. Hence whether an external fact is good or evil, depends on how we take it, what we make of it, the state of mind and heart and will into which it enters as a factor; and that in turn depends, the Stoic tells us, on ourselves, and is under our control Stoicism is fundamentally this psychological doctrine of apperception, carried over and applied in the field of the personal life,--the doctrine, namely, that no external thing alone can affect us for good or evil, until we have woven it into the texture of our mental life, painted it with the colour of our dominant mood and temper, and stamped it with the approval of our will. Thus everything except a slight residuum is through and through mental, our own product, the expression of what we are and desire to be. The only difference between Stoicism and Christian Science at this point is that Stoicism recognises the material element; though it does so only to minimise it, and pronounce it indifferent. Christian Science denies that there is any physical fact, or even the raw material out of which to make one. All is merely mental, says the consistent Christian Scientist with the toothache. There is no matter there to ache. The Stoic, truer to the facts, and in not less but more heroic spirit declares: "There is matter, but it doesn't matter if there is." The toothache can be taken as a spur to greater fortitude and equanimity than the man whose teeth are all sound has had opportunity to practically exemplify; and so the total mental state, toothache-borne-with-fortitude, may be positively good.