Diagnosis by doctrines. A rule for meeting people: not to judge the act at once, but "immediately to say to yourself" (εὐθὺς σαυτῷ πρόλεγε) — what doctrines (δόγματα) does he hold about TERMgood and TERMbad? Behavior is deduced from convictions: if a person takes TERMpleasure for a good and pain, disrepute, and death for evils, then his acts follow of necessity from that scale. Then "nothing will be surprising" (οὐδὲν θαυμαστόν) — astonishment and anger arise only from a failure to grasp the cause.

"He is compelled" (ἀναγκάζεται). The key move is a determinism by way of moral psychology: a person "is compelled to act so" by his false doctrines. This is the Stoic version of the Socratic "no one errs willingly": a fault is ignorance of the true good (cf. 8.59: either teach them or bear with them; 7.22: they err through ignorance and against their will; 2.1: all this comes from ignorance of good and evil, and the wrongdoer is my kin). The therapeutic conclusion is not exculpation but the removal of personal offense: another's fault is impersonal, like the juice in a fig-tree (4.6; cf. the fig-tree bearing figs, 8.15). The governing discipline is assent (to grasp the cause of the act), the sustaining one action (how to bear oneself toward people).