STOICISM 



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<>f Rhodes, who, again, taught Positioning of 

 Apamea, in Syria. Posidonius was acquainted 

 with Marius and Pompey, and taught Cicero ; 

 but the moral treatise of Cicero, De Officiis, is 

 derived from a work of Pansetius. The third period 

 of Stoicism is Roman. In this period we have 

 Cato the Younger, who invited to his house the 

 philosopher Athenodorus ; and, under the Empire, 

 the three Stoic philosophers whose writings have 

 come down to us Seneca, Epictetus, and the 

 Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism prevailed 

 widely in the Roman world, although not to the 

 exclusion of Epicurean views. 



The leading Stoical doctrines are given in certain 

 phrases or expressions, as ' life according to nature,' 

 the ideal 'wise man,' 'apathy,' or equanimity of 

 mind, the power of the ' will,' the worship of ' duty," 

 the constant ' advance ' in virtue, &c. But the 

 system will he best considered under four heads 

 the Theology ; the Psychology ; the theory of the 

 Good ; and the scheme of Virtue. 



( 1 ) The Stoics held that the universe is governed 

 by one good and wise God. According to Epic- 

 tetns, God is the father of men ; Marcus Aurelius 

 exults in the beautiful arrangement of all things. 

 They did not admit that the Deity intermeddled 

 in the smaller details of life ; they allowed that 

 omens and oracles might be accepted as signs of 

 the foreordained arrangement of God. They held 

 this foreordination even to the length of fatalism, 

 and made the same replies as have been given in 

 modern times to the difficulty of reconciling it with 

 Free- will. God is the author of all things except 

 wickedness ; the very nature of good supposes its 

 contrast evil, and the two are inseparable, like light 

 and dark ; in the enormous extent of the universe 

 some things must be neglected ; when evil happens 

 to the good, it is not as a punishment, but as con- 

 nected with a different dispensation ; parts of the 

 world may be presided over by evil demons ; what 

 we call evil may not be evil. Like most other an- 

 cient schools, the Stoics held God to be corporeal like 

 man ; body is the only substance ; nothing incor- 

 poreal confd act on what is corporeal ; the first cause 

 of all, God or Zeus, is the primeval fire, emanating 

 from which in the soul of man in the form of a warm 

 ether. Their theory of the universe may in fact be 

 described as a materialistic pantheism. It is for 

 human beings to recognise the universe as governed 

 by universal law, and not only to raise their minds 

 to the comprehension of it, but to enter into the 

 views of the Creator, who must regard all interests 

 equally ; man should be, as it were, in league with 

 Him, merge self in the universal order, think only 

 of that and its welfare. By this elevation of 

 view we are necessarily raised far above the con- 

 sideration of the petty events befalling ourselves. 

 The grand effort of human reason is thus to rise to 

 the abstraction or totality of entire nature. The 

 Stoics held the theory of the absorption of the indi- 

 vidual soul at death into the divine essence ; but, 

 on the other hand, their doctrine of advance and 

 aspiration is what has in all times been the main 

 natural argument for the immortality of the soul. 

 For the most part they kept themselves undecided 

 as to immortality, giving it as an alternative, but 

 reasoning as to our conduct on either supposition, 

 and submitting to the pleasure of God in this as in 

 all other things. In arguing for the existence of 

 divine power and government they employed what 

 has been called the argument from design. 



(2) As to the constitution of the mind, they held 

 that men have bodies like animals, but reason or 

 intelligence like the gods. Animals have instinc- 

 tive principles of action ; man alone has a rational, 

 intelligent soul. According to Marcus Anrelins, 

 we come into contact with Deity by our intellectual 

 part, and our highest life is thus the divine life. 



But the most important Stoical doctrine respect- 

 ing the nature of man is the recognition of reason 

 as a superior power or faculty that subordinates 

 all the rest the governing intelligence. This, 

 however, is not a mere intellectual principle, but 

 an active force, uniting intellect and will. The 

 bodily sensibilities are opposed to this higher 

 reason and will, which, however, is strong enough 

 to control them. Another way of expressing the 

 same view was the power of the mind over the 

 body, which was dwelt upon by Epictetus in the 

 most exaggerated form. (The assertion of a doc- 

 trine so obviously contrary to the fact as that 

 sickness may affect the body without enfeebling the 

 mind could only end in practical failure, or else in. 

 contradiction.) In Seneca we find something very 

 closely approaching to the Christian doctrine of the 

 corruption of human nature. The littleness of 

 humanity was a favourite theme of Marcus Aure- 

 lius, and naturally followed from the Stoical mode 

 of contemplating the universe at large. The doc- 

 trine called the freedom of will may be said to 

 have originated with the Stoics, although with 

 them it was chiefly a rhetorical mode of expressing 

 the dignity of the wise man, and his power of 

 rising superior to circumstances. To prepare the 

 way for the Stoical precepts Epictetus distin- 

 guished between things in our power and things 

 not in our power. The things in our power are our 

 opinions and notions about objects, and all our 

 affections, desires, and aversions ; the things not 

 in our power are our bodies, wealth, honour, rank, 

 authority, &c. Wealth and high rank may not be in 

 our power, but we have the power to form an idea 

 of these viz. that they are unimportant, whence 

 the want of them will not grieve us. A still more 

 pointed application is to death, whose force is 

 entirely in tne idea. 



(3) The Good was not by the Stoics identified 

 with happiness. Happiness is not necessary, and 

 may be dispensed with, and pain is no evil. 

 Pains are in a sense an evil, but, by a proper 

 discipline, may be triumphed over. They dis- 

 allowed the direct and ostensible pursuit of 

 pleasure as an end (the point of view of Epicurus), 

 but allured their followers partly by promising 

 them the victory over pain, and partly by the lofty 

 enjoyments that grew out of their plan of life. 

 Pain of every kind, whether from the casualties 

 of existence or from the severity of the Stoical 

 virtues, was to be met by a discipline of endurance. 

 Great stress was laid on the instability of pleasure, 

 and the constant liability to accidents ; whence we 

 should always be anticipating and adapting our- 

 selves to the worst that could happen, so as never 

 to l>e in a state where anything could ruffle the 

 mind. Much might still oe made of the worst 

 circumstances poverty, banishment, public odium, 

 sickness, old age. Such a discipline was peculiarly 

 suited to the unsettled condition of the world at 

 the time, when any man, besides the ordinary 

 evils of life, might in a moment be sent into 

 exile, or sold into slavery. Moreover, it is a 

 discipline adapted to a certain class of dispositions 

 existing in all ages men who prefer aoove all 

 things ' equanimity ' of mind, and would rather 

 dispense with great occasional pleasures than risk 

 their state of habitual composure. Next to the 

 discipline of endurance we must rank the com- 

 placent sentiment of pride, which the Stoic might 

 justly feel in his conquest of himself. It was 

 usual to bestow the most extravagant lauda- 

 tion on the 'wise man,' and every Stoic could take 

 this home to the extent that he considered himself 

 as approaching that great ideal. The last and 

 most elevated form of Stoical happiness was the 

 satisfaction of contemplating the universe and God. 

 The work of Marcus Aurelins is full of studies of 



