Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/586

 562 STOICS Zeno. fell at a time when the great movement which Socrates originated had spent itself in the second generation of his spiritual descendants. Neither Theophrastus at the Lyceum, nor Xenocrates and Polemo at the Academy, nor Stilpo, who was drawing crowds to hear him at Megara, could be said to have inherited much of the great reformer's intellectual vigour, to say nothing of his moral earnestness. Zeno visited all the schools in turn, but seems to have attached himself definitely to the Cynics ; as a Cynic he composed at least one of his more important works, "the much admired Republic," which we know to have been later on a stumbling-block to the school. In the Cynic school he found the practical spirit which he divined to be the great need of that stirring troublous age. For a while his motto must have been " back to Socrates," or at least "back to Antisthenes." The Stoics always counted themselves amongst the Socratic schools, and canonized Antisthenes and Diogenes ; while reverence for Socrates was the tie which united to them such an accom- plished writer upon lighter ethical topics as the versatile Persoeus, who. at the capital of Antigonus Gonatas, with hardly anything of the professional philosopher about him, reminds us of Xenophon, or even Prodicus. Zeno com- menced, then, as a Cynic ; and in the developed system we can point to a kernel of Cynic doctrine to which various philosophemes of other thinkers (more especially Hera- clitus and Aristotle, but also Diogenes of Apollonia, the Pythagoreans, and the medical school of Hippocrates in a lesser degree) were added. Thus, quite apart from the general similarity of their ethical doctrine, the Cynics were materialists; they were also nominalists, and combated the Platonic ideas ; in their theory of knowledge they made use of "reason" (Xoyos), which was also one of their leading ethical conceptions. In all these particulars Zeno followed them, and the last is the more important, because, Chrysippus having adopted a new criterion of truth, a clear and distinct perception of sense, it is only from casual notices we learn that the elder Stoics had approxi- mated to Cynicism in making right reason the standard. At the same time, it is certain that the main outlines of the characteristic physical doctrine, which is after all the foundation of their ethics and logic, were the work of Zeno. The Logos, which had been an ethical or psycho- logical principle to the Cynics, received at his hands an extension throughout the natural world, in which Hera- clitean influence is unmistakable. Reading the Ephesian doctrine with the eyes of a Cynic, and the Cynic ethics in the light of Heracliteanism, he came to formulate his distinctive theory of the universe far in advance of either. In taking this immense stride and identifying the Cynic "reason," which is a law for man, with the "reason" which is the law of the universe, Zeno has been compared with Plato, who similarly extended the Socratic " general notion " from the region of morals, of justice, temperance, virtue, to embrace all objects of all thought, the verity of all things that are. If the recognition of physics and logic as two studies co-ordinate with ethics is sufficient to differentiate the mature Zeno from the Cynic author of the Rejwblic, no less than from his own heterodox disciple Aristo, the elaboration on all sides of Stoic natural philo- Cleanthes. sophy belongs to Clean thes, who certainly was not the merely docile and receptive intelligence he is sometimes represented as being. He carried on and completed the assimilation of Heraclitean doctrine; but his own con- tributions were more distinctive and original than those of any other Stoic. Zeno's seeming dualism of God (or force) fnd formless matter he was able to transform into the lofty pantheism which breathes in every line of the famous hymn to Zeus. Heraclitus had indeed declared all to be in flux, but we ask in vain what is the cause for the unceasing process of his ever-living fire. It was left for Cleanthes to discover this motive cause in a conception familiar to Zeno, as to the Cynics before him, but restricted to the region of ethics, the conception of tension or effort. The soul of the sage, thought the Cynics, should be strained and braced for judgment and action; his first need is firmness (eurovta) and Socratic strength. But the mind is a corporeal thing. Then followed the flash of genius : this varying tension of the one substance everywhere present, a purely physical fact, accounts for the diverse destinies of all innumerable particular things ; it is the veritable cause of the flux and process of the universe. Herein lies the key to the entire system of the Stoics, as Cleanthes's epoch-making discovery continually received fresh applications to physics, ethics, and epistemology. Other of his innovations, the outcome of his crude materialism, found less favour with his successor, who declined to follow him in identifying the primary substance with fire, or in tracing all vitality to its ultimate source in the sun, the " ruling power " of the world, a curious anticipation of scientific truth. Yet under this poetical Heraclitean mystic the school was far from flourishing. The eminent teachers of the time are said to have been Aristo, Zeno's heterodox pupil, and Arcesilas, who in Plato's name brought Megarian subtleties and Pyrrhonian agnosticism to bear upon the intruding doctrine ; and after a vigorous upgrowth it seemed not unlikely to die out. From all danger of such a fate it was rescued by its third great teacher, Chrysippus ; " but for Chrysippus there had been no Porch." Zeno had caught the practical spirit of his age, the desire for a popular philosophy to meet individual needs. But there was another tendency in post-Aristotelian thought, to lean upon authority and substitute learning for independent research, which grew stronger just in proportion as the fresh interest in the problems of the universe and the zeal for discovery declined, a shadow, we may call it, of the coming Scholasticism thrown a thousand years in advance. The representative of this tendency, Chrysippus addressed himself to the congenial task of assimilating, developing, systematizing the doctrines bequeathed to him, and, above all, securing them in their stereotyped and final form, not simply from the assaults of the past, but, as after a long and successful career of controversy and polemical author- ship he fondly hoped, from all possible attack in the future. To his personal characteristics can be traced the hair- splitting and formal pedantry which ever afterwards marked the activity of the school, the dry repellent technical pro- cedure of the Dialecticians par excellence, as they were called. He created their formal logic and contributed much that was of value to their psychology and epistem- ology ; but in the main his work was to new-label and new-arrange in every department, and to lavish most care and attention on the least important parts, the logical terminology and the refutation of fallacies, or, as his opponents declared, the exeogitation of fallacies which even he could not refute. In his Republic Zeno had gone so far as to declare the routine education of the day (e.g., mathematics, grammar, &c.) to be of no use. Such Cynic crudity Chrysippus rightly judged to be out of keeping with the requirements of a great dogmatic school, and he laboured on all sides after thoroughness, erudition, and scientific completeness. In short, Chrysippus made the Stoic system what it was, and as he left it we proceed to describe it. And first we will inquire, What is philosophy ? No idle gratification of curiosity, as Aristotle fabled of his life intellectual (which would be but a disguise for refined pleasure), no theory divorced from practice, no pursuit of science for its own sake, but knowledge so far forth as it Chrysip pus. Concep- ti of