Sensitive to the temper of their disjointed times, the Stoics constructed a philosophy which emphasized ethics or rules of good living rather than abstract and scientific speculation. The goal of man, they said, was not to shape the world, but to shape the will of man to conform to an environment which could not be changed. Stoicism was a philosophy of acceptance and self-discipline; it produced men of iron will, but limited imagination, doers rather than thinkers. It came to fullest flower in the life and writings of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.