184 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



stitutes the essential " nature " of man, is most nearly represented 

 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 

 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 

 toward 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.* 



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 im- 

 perative 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, f To the Stoic, the 



* The Stoics said that man was a cpov \oyiKbv iroXiriKbv 4A.aAArj\o>/, or a rational, a 

 political, and an altruistic or philanthropic animal. In their view, his higher nature tended 

 to develop in these three directions as a plant tends to grow up into its typical form. Since, 

 without the introduction of any consideration of pleasure or pain, whatever thwarted the 

 realization of its type by the plant might be said to be bad, and whatever helped it good ; 

 so virtue, in the Stoical sense, as the conduct which tended to the attainment of the rational, 

 political, and philanthropic ideal, was good in itself and irrespectively of its emotional con- 

 comitants. 



Man is an " animal sociale communi bono genitum." The safety of society depends upon 

 practical recognition of the fact. " Salva autem esse societas nisi custodia et amore partium 

 non possit," says Seneca. (De Ira, ii, 31.) [The safety of society depends upon the love 

 and care of its component parts.] 



f The importance of the physical doctrine of the Stoics lies in its clear recognition of 

 the universality of the law of causation with its corollary, the order of Nature : the exact 

 form of that order is an altogether secondary consideration. 



Many ingenious persons now appear to consider that the incompatibility of pantheism, 

 of materialism, and of any doubt about the immortality of the soul, with religion and 

 morality, is to be held as an axiomatic truth. I confess that I have a certain difficulty in 

 accepting this dogma. For the Stoics were notoriously materialists and pantheists of the 

 most extreme character ; and while no strict stoic believed in the eternal duration of the 

 individual soul, some even denied its persistence after death. Yet it is equally certain that 

 of all Gentile philosophies, Stoicism exhibits the highest ethical development, is animated 

 by the most religious spirit, and has exerted the profoundest influence upon the moral and 

 religious development not merely of the best men among the Romans, but among the 

 moderns down to our own day. 



Seneca was claimed as a Christian and placed among the saints by the fathers of the 

 early Christian Church ; and the genuineness of a correspondence between him and the 

 apostle Paul has been hotly maintained in our own time by orthodox writers. That the 



