STOICAL ETHICS AND EVOLUTION 27 



ideal of the supreme good and demands absolute 

 submission of the will to its behests. It is this 

 which commands all men to love one another, to return 

 good for evil, to regard one another as fellow-citizens 

 of one great state. Indeed, seeing that the progress 

 towards perfection of a civilized state, or polity, 

 depends on the obedience of its members to these 

 commands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure 

 reason the ' political ' nature. Unfortunately, the 

 sense of the adjective has undergone so much 

 modification, that the application of it to that which 

 commands the sacrifice of self to the common good 

 would now sound almost grotesque. ( 15 ) 



But what part is played by the theory of evolution 

 in this view of ethics ? So far as I can discern, the 

 ethical system of the Stoics, which is essentially 

 intuitive, and reverences the categorical imperative 

 as strongly as that of any later moralists, might have 

 been just what it was if they had held any other 

 theory ; whether that of special creation, on the 

 one side, or that of the eternal existence of the 

 present order, on the other. ( 16 ) To the Stoic, the 

 cosmos had no importance for the conscience, 

 except in so far as he chose to think it a peda- 

 gogue to virtue. The pertinacious optimism of our 

 philosophers hid from them the actual state of the 

 case. It prevented them from seeing that cosmic 

 nature is no school of virtue, but the head- quarters 

 of the enemy of ethical nature. The logic of facts 

 was necessary to convince them that the cosmos 



