74 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 



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conduct. Ethics would thus become applied 

 Natural History. In fact, a confused employment 

 of the maxim, in this sense, has done immeasur 

 able mischief in later times. It has furnished an 

 axiomatic foundation for the philosophy of philo- 

 sophasters and for the moralizing of sentimentalists. 

 But the Stoics were, at bottom, not merely noble, 

 but sane, men ; and if we look closely into what 

 they really meant by this ill-used phrase, it will 

 be found to present no justification for the mis 

 chievous conclusions that have been deduced 

 from it. 



In the language of the Stoa, Nature was a 

 word of many meanings. There was the Nature 

 of the cosmos and the Nature of man. In the 

 latter, the animal nature, which man shares 

 with a moiety of the living part of the cosmos, was 

 distinguished from a higher nature. Even in 

 this higher nature there were grades of rank. 

 The logical faculty is an instrument which may be 

 turned to account for any purpose. The passions 

 and the emotions are so closely tied to the lower 

 nature that they may be considered to be patho 

 logical, rather than normal, phenomena. The one 

 supreme, hegemonic, faculty, which constitutes the 

 essential c nature of man, is most nearly repre 

 sented by that which, in the language of a later 

 philosophy, has been called the pure reason. It is 

 this nature which holds up the ideal of the 

 supreme good and demands absolute submission of 



