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If, however, in the science of nature the Stoics can lay claim to no striking originality, the case is different when we come to the science of man. In the rational creatures—man and the gods—Pneuma is manifested in a high degree of purity and intensity as an emanation from the world-soul, itself an emanation from the primary substance of purest ether—a spark of the celestial fire, or, more accurately, fiery breath, which is a mean between fire and air, characterized by vital warmth more than by dryness. The physical basis of Stoic psychology deserves the closest attention. On the one hand, soul is corporeal, else it would have no real existence, would be incapable of extension in three dimensions (and therefore of equable diffusion all over the body), incapable of holding the body together, as the Stoics contended

that it does, herein presenting a sharp contrast to the Epicurean tenet that it is the body which confines and shelters the light vagrant atoms of soul. On the other hand, this corporeal thing is veritably and identically reason, mind, and ruling principle ; in virtue of its divine origin Cleanthes can say to Zeus, “We too are thy offspring,” and a Seneca can calmly insist that, if man and God are not on perfect equality, the superiority rests rather on our side. What God is for the world that the soul is for man. The Cosmos must be conceived as a single whole, its variety being referred to varying stages of condensation in Pneuma. So, too, the human soul must possess absolute simplicity, its varying functions being conditioned by the degrees or species of its tension. It follows that of “parts” of the soul, as previous thinkers imagined, there can be no question; all that can consistently be maintained is that from the centre of the body—the heart—seven distinct air-currents are discharged to various organs, which are so many modes of the one soul's activity. The ethical consequences of this position will be seen at a later stage. With this psychology is intimately connected the Stoic theory of knowledge. From the unity of soul it follows that all psychical processes—sensation, assent, impulse—proceed from reason, the ruling part; that is to say, there is no strife or division: the one rational soul alone has sensations, assents to judgments, is impelled towards objects of desire just as much as it thinks or reasons. Not that all these powers at once reach full maturity. The soul at first is void of content; in the embryo it has not developed beyond the nutritive principle of a plant : at birth the “ruling part” is a blank tablet, although ready prepared to receive writing. This excludes all possibility of innate ideas or any faculty akin to intuitive reason. The source of all our knowledge is experience and discursive thought, which manipulates the materials of sense. Our ideas are copied from stored up sensations. No other theory was possible upon the foundation of the Stoic physics.