A Little Book of Stoicism | Page 4

need not entirely
abstain from the other branches of philosophy, but should study them
also as occasion offers.'
Plutarch twits Chrysippus with inconsistency, because in the face of
this declaration as to the order of treatment, he nevertheless says that
morals rest upon physics. But to this charge it may fairly be replied that
the order of exposition need not coincide with the order of existence.
Metaphysically speaking, morals may depend upon physics and the
right conduct of man be deducible from the structure of the universe
but for all that, it may be advisable to study physics later. Physics
meant the nature of God and the Universe. Our nature may be
deducible from that but it is better known to ourselves to start with, so
that it may be well to begin from the end of the stick that we have in
our hands. But that Chrysippus did teach the logical dependence of
morals on physics is plain from his own words. In his third book on the
Gods he says 'for it is not possible to find any other origin of justice or
mode of its generation save that from Zeus and the nature of the
universe for anything we have to say about good and evil must needs
derive its origin therefrom', and again in his Physical Theses, 'for there
is no other or more appropriate way of approaching the subject of good
and evil on the virtues or happiness than from the nature of all things
and the administration of the universe--for it is to these we must attach
the treatment of good and evil inasmuch as there is no better origin to
which we can refer them and inasmuch as physical speculation is taken
in solely with a view to the distinction between good and evil.'
The last words are worth noting as showing that even with Chrysippus
who has been called the intellectual founder of Stoicism the whole
stress of the philosophy of the Porch fell upon its moral teaching. It was
a favourite metaphor with the school to compare philosophy to a fertile
vineyard or orchard. Ethic was the good fruit, physic the tall plants, and
logic the strong wall. The wall existed only to guard the trees, and the

trees only to produce the fruit. Or again philosophy was likened to an
egg of which ethic was the yolk containing the chick, physic the white
which formed its nourishment while logic was the hard outside shell.
Posidonius, a later member of the school, objected to the metaphor
from the vineyard on the ground that the fruit and the trees and the wall
were all separable whereas the parts of philosophy were inseparable.
He preferred therefore to liken it to a living organism, logic being the
bones and sinews, physic the flesh and blood, but ethic the soul.
LOGIC
The Stoics had a tremendous reputation for logic. In this department
they were the successors or rather the supersessors of Aristotle. For
after the death of Theophrastus the library of the Lyceum is said to
have been buried underground at Scepsis until about a century before
Christ, So that the Organon may actually have been lost to the world
during that period. At all events under Strato the successor of
Theophrastus who specialized in natural science the school had lost its
comprehensiveness. Cicero even finds it consonant with dramatic
propriety to make Cato charge the later Peripatetics with ignorance of
logic! On the other hand Chrysippus became so famous for his logic as
to create a general impression that if there were a logic among the gods
it would be no other than the Chrysippean.
But if the Stoics were strong in logic they were weak in rhetoric. This
strength and weakness were characteristic of the school at all periods.
Cato is the only Roman Stoic to whom Cicero accords the praise of real
eloquence. In the dying accents of the school as we hear them in
Marcus Aurelius the imperial sage counts it a thing to be thankful for
that he had learnt to abstain from rhetoric, poetic, and elegance of
diction. The reader however cannot help wishing that he had taken
some means to diminish the crabbedness of his style. If a lesson were
wanted in the importance of sacrificing to the Graces it might be found
in the fact that the early Stoic writers despite their logical subtlety have
all perished and that their remains have to be sought for so largely in
the pages of Cicero. In speaking of logic as one of the three
departments of philosophy we must bear in mind that the term was one

of much wider meaning than it is with us. It included rhetoric, poetic,
and grammar as well as dialectic or logic proper, to say