A Little Book of Stoicism | Page 3

there were the opinions of ordinary men, as shown by
their lives rather than by their language. Zeno's contribution to thought
on the subject does not at first sight appear illuminating. He said that
the end was 'to live consistently,' the implication doubtless being that
no life but the passionless life of reason could ultimately be consistent
with itself. Cleanthes, his immediate successor in the school, is credited
with having added the words 'with nature,' thus completing the
well-known Stoic formula that the end is 'to live consistently with
nature.'
It was assumed by the Greeks that the ways of nature were 'the ways of
pleasantness,' and that 'all her paths' were 'peace.' This may seem to us
a startling assumption, but that is because we do not mean by 'nature'
the same thing as they did. We connect the term with the origin of a
thing, they connected it rather with the end; by the 'natural state' we
mean a state of savagery, they meant the highest civilization; we mean
by a thing's nature what it is or has been, they meant what it ought to
become under the most favourable conditions; not the sour crab, but the
mellow glory of the Hesperides worthy to be guarded by a sleepless
dragon, was to the Greeks the natural apple. Hence we find Aristotle
maintaining that the State is a natural product, because it is evolved out
of social relations which exist by nature. Nature indeed was a highly
ambiguous term to the Greeks no less than to ourselves, but in the sense
with which we are now concerned, the nature of anything was defined
by the Peripatetics as 'the end of its becoming.' Another definition of
theirs puts the matter still more clearly. 'What each thing is when its
growth has been completed, that we declare to be the nature of each
thing'.
Following out this conception the Stoics identified a life in accordance
with nature with a life in accordance with the highest perfection to

which man could attain. Now, as man was essentially a rational animal,
his work as man lay in living the rational life. And the perfection of
reason was virtue. Hence the ways of nature were no other than the
ways of virtue. And so it came about that the Stoic formula might be
expressed in a number of different ways which yet all amounted to the
same thing. The end was to live the virtuous life, or to live consistently,
or to live in accordance with nature, or to live rationally.
DIVISION OF PHILOSOPHY.
Philosophy was defined by the Stoics as 'the knowledge of things
divine and human'. It was divided into three departments; logic, ethic,
and physic. This division indeed was in existence before their time, but
they have got the credit of it as of some other things which they did not
originate. Neither was it confined to them, but was part of the common
stock of thought. Even the Epicureans, who are said to have rejected
logic can hardly be counted as dissentients from this threefold division.
For what they did was to substitute for the Stoic logic a logic of their
own, dealing with the notions derived from sense, much in the same
way as Bacon substituted his Novum Organum for the Organon of
Aristotle. Cleanthes we are told recognised six parts of philosophy,
namely, dialectic, rhetoric, ethic, politic, physic, and theology, but
these are obviously the result of subdivision of the primary ones. Of the
three departments we may say that logic deals with the form and
expression of knowledge, physic with the matter of knowledge, and
ethic with the use of knowledge. The division may also be justified in
this way. Philosophy must study either nature (including the divine
nature) or man; and, if it studies man, it must regard him either from
the side of the intellect or of the feelings, that is either as a thinking
(logic) or as an acting (ethic) being.
As to the order in which the different departments should he studied,
we have had preserved to us the actual words of Chrysippus in his
fourth book on Lives. 'First of all then it seems to me that, as has been
rightly said by the ancients, there are three heads under which the
speculations of the philosopher fall, logic, ethic, physic; next, that of
these the logical should come first, the ethical second, and the physical

third, and that of the physical the treatment of the gods should come
last, whence also they have given the name of "completions" to the
instruction delivered on this subject'. That this order however might
yield to convenience is plain from another book on the use of reason,
where he says that 'the student who takes up logic first