INTRODUCTION 



science. Yet there is considerable internal evidence in 

 the Q.N. that his pursuit of such studies was in part an 

 outcome of the true scientific spirit, and that he possessed 

 in no ordinary degree the scientific imagination. Still, 

 when all due allowance is made for this, it remains true 

 that Seneca was moralist first and physicist or scientist 

 afterwards. Physics led to theology, 1 and had thus a 

 direct bearing on man's destiny and fate. Had there been 

 no Ethics, whose interests were involved in a knowledge 

 of the universe, its parts, its function, and its author, the 

 impelling motive for the study of Physics would have been 

 removed. Possibly when his political career was closed 

 by the death of Burrus in 63, Seneca might in any case 

 have devoted some of his leisure to a subject which 

 offered such opportunities of exalted contemplation. But 

 it was his ethical aims that added the chief zest to the 

 pursuit. 2 As the various departments of knowledge had 

 not assumed definite divergent forms, there was nothing 

 incongruous to his mind in the mixture, or as he might 

 have regarded it, the union, of what to us seem so different 

 from one another as Physics and Ethics. The facts of 

 nature had, in his view, to be brought into connection with 

 the lessons that may be derived from them. In so many 

 words he tells us (102) that every study must have a 

 moral attached to it, or to put it otherwise, that physical 

 phenomena must be made the occasion for driving home 

 some general truth, establishing some ethical position, 

 clinching an argument, reprobating a vice. The conclusion 

 of each Book of the Q.N. contains the practical application 

 of the lessons to be derived .from its subject : there are not 

 infrequent digressions, too, for the same or a cognate 

 purpose. The author's moral zeal sometimes ran off with 

 him, and he felt constrained to break off for the time his 

 discussion of scientific truths and to assume the role of 

 the moralist and reformer. 3 



1 Cf. Professor Burner's Early Greek Philosophy for illustration of this in 

 earlier times. 



2 Cf. footnote 2 to p. xxxiv. 



3 The method was not obsolete for many centuries, even if it is yet wholly 

 dead. On more than one occasion the study of Natural History has been 



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