NOTES 



3*7 



the courage and elevation of mind which fit us for the 

 trials of life and the coming of death (113). 



In the treatment of scientific problems Seneca dis- 

 plays the same unhesitating assurance of the truth of his 

 opinions, which was characteristic of the philosophers of 

 antiquity. These writers had hardly a glimmering concep- 

 tion of nature's infinite complexity, of the extreme diversity 

 and intricacy of natural processes, of the unbroken and 

 endlessly ramifying relations of cause and effect, of the 

 long and patient investigation by which alone these 

 relations could be unravelled, and of the caution and 

 diffidence with which conclusions regarding them should 

 at least for a time be formulated. Seneca frequently 

 passes caustic criticisms on the views expressed by his 

 predecessors. He styles the philosophers, as a body, " a 

 credulous folk." Some of them he even goes so far as to 

 accuse of perpetrating deliberate falsehoods (276, 286, 

 289). Nor does he hesitate to banter his brethren of the 

 Stoic School, whose "absurdities," as he calls them, he 

 cannot refrain from quoting. 



Yet when his own opinions are examined in the light 

 of the present day, they are found to be in many cases no 

 nearer the truth than those which he rejected with con- 

 tempt. It is, indeed, sometimes difficult to realise the 

 mental position of a man who could adopt and propound 

 them. In many cases he accounts for a phenomenon by 

 the analogy of another to which it has no real affinity, 

 as where he explains halos by the circular undulations 

 produced on a surface of water into which a stone is 

 thrown ( 1 3). He sometimes suggests an experiment to 

 prove the truth of his assertion, but if he had made the 

 experiment he would have found how completely it failed 

 to support him, as, for instance, when he states that a 

 large pond of water reflects only one image of the sun, 

 but that, if it is divided into several smaller ponds by the 

 insertion of partitions, it will show as many images as 

 there are divisions (18). Striking also and numerous 

 are the examples of his credulous acceptance of statements 

 which, had it occurred to him to test them by actual 



