Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/587

 STOICS 563 can be realized in virtuous action, the learning of virtue by exercise and effort and training. So absolutely is the " rare and priceless wisdom " for which we strive identical with virtue itself that the three main divisions of philo- sophy current at the time and accepted by Zeno, logic, physics, and ethics, are defined as the most generic or comprehensive virtues. How otherwise could they claim our attention ? Accordingly Aristo, holding to Cynicism when Zeno himself had got beyond it, rejected two of these parts of philosophy as useless and out of reach, a divergence which excluded him from the school, but strictly consistent with his view that ethics alone is scientific knowledge. Of the three divisions logic is the least important ; ethics is the outcome of the whole, and historically the all-important vital element ; but the foundations of the whole system are best discerned in the science of nature, which deals pre-eminently Avith the macrocosm and the microcosm, the universe and man, including natural theology and an anthropology or psycho- logy, the latter forming the direct introduction to ethics. iysics. The Stoic system is in brief (a) materialism, (b) dynamic materialism, lastly (c) monism or pantheism, (a) The first of these characters is described by anticipation in Plato's Sophist (246 C sq.), where, arguing with those " who drag everything down to the corporeal" (crw/u.a), the Eleatic stranger would fain prove to them the existence of some- thing incorporeal, as follows. " They admit the existence of an animate body. Is soul then something existent (ova-fa) 1 Yes. And the qualities of soul, as justice and wisdom are they visible and tangible ? No. Do they then exist 1 They are in a dilemma." Now, however effective against Plato's contemporary Cynics or Atomists, the reasoning is thrown away upon the Stoics, who take boldly the one horn of this dilemma. That qualities of bodies (and therefore of the corporeal soul) exist they do not deny ; but they assert most uncompromisingly that they are one and all (wisdom, justice, &c.) corporeal. And they strengthen their position by taking Plato's own definition (247 D), namely, " being is that which has the power to aterial- act or be acted upon," and turning it against him. For this is only true of Body ; action, except by contact, is inconceivable ; and they reduce every form of causation to the efficient cause, which implies the communication of motion from one body to another. Again and again, therefore, only Body exists. The most real realities to Plato and Aristotle had been thought and the objects of thought, i/oi)? and vo-rjrd, whether abstracted from sensibles or inherent in " matter," as the incognizable basis of all concrete existence. But this was too great an effort to last long. Such spiritualistic theories were nowhere really maintained after Aristotle and outside the circle of his immediate followers. The reaction came and left nothing of it all ; for five centuries the dominant tone of the older and the newer schools alike was frankly materialistic. " If," says Aristotle, " there is no other substance but the organic substances of nature, physics will be the highest of the sciences," a conclusion which passed for axiomatic until the rise of Neoplatonism. The analogues therefore of metaphysical problems must be sought in physics ; particularly that problem of the causes of things for which the Platonic idea and the Peripatetic " constitutive form " Pension, had been in turn received solutions, (b) But the doctrine that all existence is confined within the limits of the sensible universe, that there is no being save corporeal being or body, does not suffice to characterize the Stoic system ; it is no less a doctrine of the Epicureans. It is the idea of tension as the essential attribute of body, in contradistinction to passive inert matter, which is dis- tinctively Stoic. The Epicureans leave unexplained the primary constitution and first movements of their atoms or elemental solids ; chance or declination may account for them. Now, to the Stoics nothing passes unexplained ; there is a reason (Adyos) for everything in nature. Every- thing which exists is at once capable of acting and being acted upon. In everything that exists, therefore, even the smallest particle, there are these two principles. By virtue of the passive principle the thing is .susceptible of motion and modification ; it is matter which determines substance (ovo-i'a). The active principle makes the matter a given determinate thing, characterizing and qualit it, whence it is termed quality (TTOIO'T^S). For all that is or happens there is an immediate cause or antecedent : and as "cause" means "cause of motion," and only body can act upon body, it follows that this antecedent cause is ' itself as truly corporeal as the matter upon which it acts. Thus we are led to regard the active principle, "force" as everywhere co-extensive with "matter," as pervading and permeating it, and together with it occupying and filling space. This is that famous doctrine of universal permea- tion (Kpacrts Si oov), by which the axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same space is practically denied. Thus that harmony of separate doctrines which contributes to the impressive simplicity of the Stoic physics is only attained at the cost of offending healthy common sense, for Body itself is robbed of a characteristic attribute. A thing is no longer, as Plato once thought, hot or hard or bright by partaking in abstract heat or hardness or bright- ness, but by containing within its own substance the mate- rial of these qualities, conceived as air-currents in various degrees of tension. We hear, too, of corporeal days and years, corporeal virtues, and actions (like walking) which are bodies (o-w/Aara). Obviously, again, the Stoic quality corresponds to Aristotle's essential form ; in both systems the active principle, " the cause of all that mat- ter becomes," is that which accounts for the existence of a given concrete thing (Adyos TIJS ovcnas). Only here, instead of assuming something immaterial (and therefore unverifiable), we fall back upon a current of air or gas (TrvevfjLo) the essential reason of the thing is itself material, standing to it in the relation of a gaseous to a solid body. Here, too, the reason of things that which accounts for them is no longer some external end to which they are tending ; it is something acting within them, " a spirit deeply interfused," germinating and developing as from a seed in the heart of each separate thing that exists (Adyos orreppmKos). By its prompting the thing grows, develops, and decays, while this "germinal reason," the element of quality in the thing, remains constant through all its changes, (c) What then, we ask, is the relation Matter between the active and the passive principles ? Is there, and or is there not, an essential distinction between substance force - or matter and pervading force or cause or quality 1 Here the Stoa shows signs of a development of doctrine. Zeno began, perhaps, by adopting the formulas of the Peri- patetics, though no doubt with a conscious difference, postulating that form was always attached to matter, no less than matter, as known to us, is everywhere shaped or informed. Whether he ever overcame the dualism which the sources, such as they are, unanimously ascribe to him is not clearly ascertained. It seems probable that he did not. But we can answer authoritatively that to Cleanthes and Chrysippus, if not to Zeno, there was no real difference between matter and its cause, which is always a corporeal Monism, current, and therefore matter, although the finest and subtlest matter. In fact they have reached the final result of unveiled hylozoism, from which the distinction of the active and passive principles is discerned to be a merely formal concession to Aristotle, a legacy from his dualistic doctrine. His technical term Form (eTSos) they never use, but always Reason or God. This was not the first time