This, in their view, is a _free mind_; not one wherein volition is independent of all motive, but one wherein the susceptibility to different motives is tempered by an ascendant reason, so as to give predominance to the better motive against the worse.

One of the strongest motives that they endeavoured to enforce, was the prudence and dignity of bringing our volitions into harmony with the schemes of Providence: which (they said) were always arranged with a view to the happiness of the kosmos on the whole.

The bad man, whose volitions conflict with these schemes, is always baulked of his expectations, and brought at last against his will to see things carried by an overruling force, with aggravated pain and humiliation to himself: while the good man, who resigns himself to them from the first, always escapes with less pain, and often without any at all.
_Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt_.
We have thus seen that in regard to the doctrine called in modern times the Freedom of the Will (_i.e._, that volitions are self-originating and unpredictable), the Stoic theorists not only denied it, but framed all their Ethics upon the assumption of the contrary.

This same assumption of the contrary, indeed, was made also by Sokrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus: in short, by all the ethical teachers of antiquity.

All of them believed that volitions depended on causes: that under the ordinary conditions of men's minds, the causes that volitions generally depended upon are often misleading and sometimes ruinous: but that by proper stimulation from without and meditation within, the rational causes of volition might be made to overrule the impulsive.
Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, not less than the Stoics, wished to create new fixed habits and a new type of character.