CHAPTER VI.. The Study of Nature. Fundamental Positions.

THE STUDY OF NATURE. FUNDAMENTAL POSITIONS.

Of far more importance in the Stoic system than the study of logic was the study of nature. This branch of learning, notwithstanding an appeal to older views, was treated by them with more independence than any other. The subjects which it included may be divided under four heads, viz.: 1. Fundamental positions; 2. The course, character, and government of the universe; 3. Irrational nature; and 4. Man.

The present chapter will be devoted to considering the first of these groups—the fundamental positions held by the Stoics in regard to nature; among which three specially deserve notice—their Materialism; their Dynamical view of the world; and their Pantheism.

Nothing appears more striking to a reader fresh from the study of Plato or Aristotle than the startling contrast to those writers presented by the Materialism of the Stoics. Whilst so far following Plato as to define a real thing to be anything possessing the capacity of acting or being acted upon, the Stoics nevertheless restricted the possession of this power to material objects. Hence followed their conclusion that nothing real exists except what is material; or, if they could not deny existence in some sense or other to what is incorporeal, they were fain to assert that essential and real Being only belongs to what is material, whereas of what is incorporeal only a certain modified kind of Being can be predicated. Following out this view, it was natural that they should regard many things as corporeal which are not generally considered such; for instance, the soul and virtue. Nevertheless, it would not be correct to say that the Stoics gave to the conception of matter or corporeity a more extended meaning than it usually bears. For they define a body to be that which has three dimensions, and they also lay themselves out to prove how things generally considered to be incorporeal may be material in the strictest sense of the term. Thus besides upholding the corporeal character of all substances, including the human soul and God, they likewise assert that properties or forms are material: all attributes by means of which one object is distinguished from another are produced by the existence [(β) Theory of air-currents.] of certain air-currents, which, emanating from the centre of an object, diffuse themselves to its extremities, and having reached the surface, return again to the centre to constitute the inward unity. Nor was the theory of air-currents confined to bodily attributes. It was applied quite as much to mental attributes. Virtues and vices are said to be material, and are deduced from the tension imparted to the soul by atmospheric substances therein subsisting. For the same reason the Good is called a body, for according to the Stoics the Good is only a virtue, and virtue is a definite condition of that material which constitutes the soul. In the same sense also truth is said to be material, personal and not independent, truth being of course meant, that is to say, knowledge, or a property of the soul that knows. And since according to the Stoics knowledge consists in the presence of certain material elements within the soul, truth in the sense of knowledge may be rightly called something material. Even emotions, impulses, notions and judgments, in so far as they are due to material causes—the air-currents pouring into the soul (πνεύματα)—were regarded as material objects, and for the same reason not only artistic skill but individual actions were said to be corporeal. Yet [(γ) The causes of actions material.] certain actions, such as walking and dancing, can hardly have been called bodies by the Stoics, any more than being wise was called a body; but the objects which produced these actions, as indeed everything which makes itself felt, were considered to be corporeal. To us it appears most natural to refer these actions to the soul as their originating cause; but the Stoics, holding the theory of subject-matter and property, preferred to refer each such action to some special material as its cause, considering that an action is due to the presence of this material. The idealism of Plato was thus reproduced in a new form by the materialism of the Stoics. Plato had said, a man is just and musical when he participates in the idea of justice and music; the Stoics said, a man is virtuous when the material producing virtue is in him; musical, when he has the material producing music.

Moreover, these materials produce the phenomena of life. Hence, not content with calling them bodies, the Stoics actually went so far as to call them living beings. It seems, however, strange to hear such things as day and night, and parts of the day and parts of the night, months and years, even days of the month and seasons of the year, called bodies; but by these singularly unhappy expressions Chrysippus appears to have meant little more than that the realities corresponding to these names depend on certain material conditions: by summer is meant a certain state of the air when highly heated by the sun; by month the moon for a certain definite period during which it gives light to the earth. From all these examples one thing is clear, how impossible the Stoics found it to assign reality to what is not material.

In carrying out this theory, they could not, as might be expected, wholly succeed. Hence a Stoic could not deny that there are certain things which it is absurd to call material. Among such include empty space, place, time, and expression (λεκτόν). Admitting these to be incorporeal, they still would not allow that they do not exist at all. This view belongs only to isolated members of the Stoic School, for which they must be held personally responsible. How they could harmonise belief in incorporeal things with their tenet that existence alone belongs to what is material is not on record.

The question next before us is: What led the Stoics to this materialism? It might be supposed that their peculiar theory of knowledge based on sensation was the cause; but this theory did not preclude the possibility of advancing from the sensible to the super-sensible. It might quite as well be said that their theory of knowledge was a consequence of their materialism, and that they referred all knowledge to sensation, because they could allow no real being to anything which is not material. The probability therefore remains that their theory of knowledge and their materialistic view of nature both indicate one and the same habit of mind, and that both are due to the action of the same causes.

Nor will it do to seek for these causes in the influence exercised by the Peripatetic or pre-Socratic philosophy on the Stoic School. At first sight, indeed, it might appear that the Stoics had borrowed from Heraclitus their materialism, together with their other views on nature; or else their materialism might seem to be an expansion of the metaphysical notions of Plato and Aristotle. For if Aristotle denied Plato’s distinction of form and matter to such an extent that he would hardly allow form to exist at all except in union with matter, might it not appear to others more logical to do away with the distinction between them in thought, thus reducing both to a property of matter? Were there not difficulties in the doctrine of a God external to the world, of a passionless Reason? Were there not even difficulties in the antithesis of form and matter, which Aristotle’s system was powerless to overcome? And had not Aristoxenus and Dicæarchus before the time of Zeno, and Strato immediately after his time, been led from the ground occupied by the Peripatetics to materialistic views? And yet we must pause before accepting this explanation. The founder of Stoicism appears, from what is recorded of his intellectual growth, to have been repelled by the Peripatetic School more than by any other; nor is there the least indication in the records of the Stoic teaching that that teaching resulted from a criticism of the Aristotelian and Platonic views of a double origin of things. Far from it, the proposition that everything capable of acting or being acted upon must be material, appears with the Stoics as an independent axiom needing no further proof.

The supposed connection between the Stoics and Heraclitus, so far from explaining their materialistic views, already presumes their existence. Yet long before Zeno’s time the philosophy of Heraclitus as a living tradition had become extinct. No historical connection therefore, or relation of original dependence, can possibly exist between the two, but at most a subsequent perception of relationship can have directed Zeno to Heraclitus. Zeno’s own view of the world was not a consequence, but the cause, of his sympathy with Heraclitus. In short, neither the Peripatetics nor Heraclitus can have given the first impulse to Zeno’s materialism, although they may have helped in many ways to strengthen his views on that subject, when already formed.

The real causes for these views must therefore be sought elsewhere, and will be found in the central idea of the whole system of the Stoics—the practical character of their philosophy. Devoting themselves from the outset with all their energies to practical enquiries, the Stoics in their theory of nature occupied the ground of common views, which know of no real object excepting what is grossly sensible and corporeal. Their aim in speculation was to discover a firm basis for human actions. In action, however, men are brought into direct and experimental contact with objects. The objects thus presented to the senses we are brought face to face with in naked reality, nor is an opportunity afforded for doubting their real being. Their reality is proved practically, inasmuch as it affects us and offers itself for the exercise of our powers. In every such exercise of power, both subject and object are always material. Even when an impression is conveyed to the soul of man, the direct instrument is something material—the voice or the gesture. In the region of experience there are no such things as non-material impressions. This was the ground occupied by the Stoics: a real thing is what either acts on us, or is acted upon by us. Such a thing is naturally material; and the Stoics with their practical ideas not being able to soar above that which is most obvious, declared that reality belongs only to the world of bodies.

Herefrom it would appear to follow that only individual perceptions are true, and that all general conceptions without exception must be false. If each notion (λεκτὸν) is incorporeal, and consequently unreal, will not absence of reality in a much higher degree belong to the notion of what is general? [(a) Individual perceptions alone true; yet a higher truth assigned to general conceptions.] Individual notions refer directly to perceptions, i.e. to things incorporeal; nevertheless they indirectly refer to the things perceived, i.e. to what is material. But general notions do not even indirectly refer to anything corporeal; they are pure fabrications of the mind, which have nothing real as their object. This the Stoics explicitly maintained. It was therefore a gross inconsistency to attribute notwithstanding to these general conceptions, to which no real objects correspond, a higher truth and certainty than belongs to the perceptions of individual objects, but an inconsistency which the Stoic system made not the slightest attempt to overcome.

The materialism of the Stoics likewise led to some remarkable assertions in the province of natural science. If the attributes of things, the soul and even the powers of the soul, are all corporeal, the relation of attributes to their objects, of the soul to the body, of one body to another body, is that of mutual intermingling. Moreover, inasmuch as the essential attributes of any definite material belong to every part of that material, and the soul resides in every part of the body, without the soul’s being identical with the body, and without the attributes being identical with the material to which they belong, or with one another; it follows that one body may intermingle with another not only by occupying the vacant spaces in that body, but by interpenetrating all its parts, without, however, being fused into a homogeneous mass with it. This view involves not only a denial of the impenetrability of matter, but it further supposes that a smaller body when mingled with a greater body will extend over the whole of the latter. It is known as the Stoic theory of universal intermingling (κρᾶσις δι’ ὅλων), and is alike different from the ordinary view of mechanical mixture and from that of chemical mixture. It differs from the former in that every part of the one body is interpenetrated by every part of the other; from the latter, because the bodies after mixture still retain their own properties. This peculiar theory, which is one of the much debated but distinctive features of the Stoic system, cannot have been deduced from physical causes. On the contrary, the arguments by which Chrysippus supported it prove that it was ultimately the result of metaphysical considerations. We have, moreover, no reason to doubt it as a fact, inasmuch as the materialistic undercurrent of the Stoic system affords the best explanation of it.

Although the stamp of materialism was sharply cut, and its application fearlessly made by the Stoics, they were yet far from holding the mechanical theory of nature, which appears to us to be a necessary consequence of strict materialism. The universe was explained on a dynamical theory; the notion of force was placed above the notion of matter. To matter, they held, alone belongs real existence; but the characteristic of real existence they sought in causation, in the capacity to act and to be acted upon. This capacity belongs to matter only by virtue of certain inherent forces, which impart to it definite attributes. Let pure matter devoid of every attribute be considered, the matter which underlies all definite materials, and out of which all things are made; it will be found to be purely passive, a something subject to any change, able to assume any shape and quality, but taken by itself devoid of quality and unable to produce any change whatsoever. This inert and powerless matter is first reduced into shape by means of attributes, all of which suppose tension in the air-currents which produce them, and consequently suppose a force producing tension. Even the shape of bodies, and the place they occupy in space, is, according to the Stoics, something derivative, the consequence of tension; tension keeping the different particles apart in one or the other particular way. Just as some modern physiologists construct nature by putting together a sum of forces of attraction and repulsion, so the Stoics refer nature to two forces, or, speaking more accurately, to a double kind of motion—expansion and condensation. Expansion works outwardly, condensation inwardly; condensation produces being, or what is synonymous with it, matter; expansion gives rise to the attributes of things. Whilst, therefore, they assert that everything really existing must be material, they still distinguish in what is material two component parts—the part which is acted upon, and the part which acts, or in other words matter and force.

The Stoics, however, would not agree with Plato and Aristotle so far as to allow to formal and final causes a place side by side with this acting force or efficient cause. If in general anything may be called a cause which serves to bring about a definite result —and various kinds of causes may be distinguished, according as they bring about this result directly or indirectly, by themselves alone or by the help of others —in the highest sense there can be, according to the Stoics, only one acting or efficient cause. The form is due to the workman, and is therefore only a part of the efficient cause. The type-form is only an instrument, which the workman employs in his work. The final cause or end-in-chief, in as far as it represents the workman’s intention, is only an occasional cause; in as far as it belongs to the work he is about, it is not a cause at all, but a result. There can be but one pure and unconditional cause, just as there can be but one matter; and to this efficient cause everything that exists and everything that takes place must be referred.

In attempting to form a more accurate notion of this efficient cause, the first point which deserves attention is, that the Stoics believed every kind of action ultimately to proceed from one source. For how could the world be such a self-circumscribed unity, such an harmonious whole, unless it were governed by one and the same force? Again, as everything which acts is material, the highest efficient cause must likewise be considered material; and since all qualities and forces are produced by vapour-like or fiery elements, can it be otherwise with the highest acting force? Everywhere warmth is the cause of nourishment and growth, life and motion; all things have in themselves their own natural heat, and are preserved and kept in life by the heat of the sun. What applies to parts of the world must apply to the world as a whole; hence heat or fire is the power to which the life and the existence of the world must be referred.

This power must be further defined to be the soul of the world, the highest reason, a kind, beneficent, and philanthropic being; in short, deity. The universal belief and the universal worship of God prove this, as the Stoics think, beyond a doubt; still more accurate investigation confirms it. Matter can never move or fashion itself; nothing but a power inherent as the soul is in man can produce these results. The world would not be the most perfect and complete thing it is unless Reason were inherent therein; nor could it contain any beings possessed of consciousness, unless it were conscious itself. It could not produce creatures endowed with a soul and reason, unless it were itself endowed with a soul and reason. Actions so far surpassing man’s power could not exist, unless there were a cause for them in perfection equally surpassing man. The subordination of means to ends which governs the world in every part down to the minutest details would be inexplicable, unless the world owed its origin to a reasonable creator. The graduated rank of beings would be incomplete, unless there were a highest Being of all whose moral and intellectual perfection cannot be surpassed. Although this perfection belongs, in the first place, to the world as a whole, nevertheless, as in everything consisting of many parts, so in the world the ruling part must be distinguished from other parts. It is the part from which all acting forces emanate and diffuse themselves over the world, whether the seat of this efficient force be placed in the heaven, as was done by Zeno, Chrysippus, and the majority of the Stoics; or in the sun, as by Cleanthes; or in the centre of the world, as by Archedemus. This primary source of all life and motion, the highest Cause and the highest Reason, is God. God, therefore, and formless matter, are the two ultimate grounds of things.

The language used by the Stoics in reference to the Deity at one time gives greater prominence to the material, at another to the spiritual side of their conception of God. As a rule, both are united in expressions which only cease to be startling when taken in connection with Stoic views in general. God is spoken of as being Fire, Ether, Air, most commonly as being πνεῦμα or Atmospheric-Current, pervading everything without exception, what is most base and ugly, as well as what is most beautiful. He is further described as the Soul, the Mind, or the Reason of the world; as a united Whole, containing in Himself the germs of all things; as the Connecting element in all things; as Universal Law, Nature, Destiny, Providence; as a perfect, happy, ever kind and all-knowing Being; nor was it hard to show that no conception could be formed of God without these attributes. Both kinds of expression are combined in the assertion that God is the fiery Reason of the World, the Mind in Matter, the reasonable Air-Current, penetrating all things, and assuming various names according to the material in which He resides, the artistically moulding Fire, containing in Himself the germs of everything, and producing according to an unalterable law the world and all that is therein.

As used in the Stoic system, these expressions generally mean one and the same thing. It is an unimportant difference whether the original cause is described as an Air-Current or as Ether, or as Heat or as Fire. It is an Air-Current, for Air-Currents are, as we have already seen, the causes of the properties of things, giving them shape and connection. It is also Fire, for by fire is only meant the warm air, or the fiery fluid, which is sometimes called Ether, at other times Fire, at other times Heat, and which is expressly distinguished from ordinary fire. Moreover the terms, Soul of the world, Reason of the world, Nature, Universal Law, Providence, Destiny—all mean the same thing, the one primary force penetrating the whole world. Even the more abstract expressions, Law, Providence, Destiny, have with the Stoics an essentially gross meaning, implying not only the form according to which the world is arranged and governed, but also the essential substance of the world, as a power above everything particular and individual. If Nature must be distinguished from Destiny, and both of these notions again from Zeus, the distinction can only consist herein, that the three conceptions describe one original Being at different stages of His manifestation and growth. Viewed as the whole of the world it is called Zeus; viewed as the inner power in the world, Providence or Destiny; and to prove this identity at the close of every period, so taught Chrysippus, Zeus goes back into Providence.

Upon closer examination, even the difference between the materialistic and idealistic description of God vanishes. God, according to Stoic principles, can only be invested with reality when He has a material form. Hence, when He is called the Soul, the Mind, or the Reason of the world, this language does not exclude, but rather presupposes, that these conceptions have bodies; and such bodies the Stoics thought to discern in that heated fluid which they at one time call the all-penetrating Breath, at another Ether, or primary Fire. Each of these two determinations appeared to them indispensable, and both became identical by assuming, as the Stoics did, that the infinite character of the divine Reason depends on the purity and lightness of the fiery material which composes it. Seneca is therefore only following out the principles of his School when he pronounces it indifferent whether God is regarded as Destiny or as an all-pervading Breath. Those who charge the Stoics with inconsistency for calling God at one time Reason, at another Soul of the universe, at another Destiny, at another Fire, Ether, or even the Universe, forget that they are attaching to these terms a meaning entirely different from that in which they were used by them.

The more the two sides of the conception of God—the material and the ideal—are compared, the clearer it becomes that there is no difference between God and primary Matter. Both are one and the same substance, which, when regarded as the universal substratum, is known as undetermined matter; but when conceived of as acting force, is called all-pervading Ether, all-warming Fire, all-penetrating Air, Nature, Soul of the world, Reason of the world, Providence, Destiny, God. Matter and power, material and form, are not, as with Aristotle, things radically different, though united from all eternity. Far from it, the forming force resides in matter as such; it is in itself something material; it is identical with Ether, or Fire-element, or Breath. Hence the difference between efficient and material cause, between God and matter, resolves itself into the difference between Breath and other elements. This difference, too, is no original or ultimate difference. According to the Stoic teaching, every particular element has in process of time developed out of primary fire or God, and to God it will return at the end of every period of the world. It is therefore only a derivative and passing difference with which we are here concerned. But taking the conception of Deity in its full meaning, it may be described as primary matter, as well as primary power. The sum total of all that is real is the divine Breath, moving forth from itself and returning to itself again. Deity itself is primary fire, containing in itself in germ both God and matter; the world in its original gaseous condition; the Universal Substance changing into particular elements, and from them returning to itself again, which regarded in its real form as God includes at one time everything, at another only a part of real existence.

From what has been said it follows that the Stoics admitted no essential difference between God and the world. Their system was therefore strictly pantheistic. The world is the sum of all real existence, and all real existence is originally contained in deity, which is at once the matter of everything and the creative force which moulds this matter into particular individual substances. We can, therefore, think of nothing which is not either immediately deity or a manifestation of deity. In point of essence, therefore, God and the world are the same; indeed, the two conceptions are declared by the Stoics to be absolutely identical. If they have nevertheless to be distinguished, the distinction is only derivative and partial. The same universal Being is called God when it is regarded as a whole, World when it is regarded as progressive in one of the many forms assumed in the course of its development. The difference, therefore, is tantamount to assigning a difference of meaning to the term world, according as it is used to express the whole of what exists, or only the derivative part.

Still this distinction does not depend only upon our way of looking at things, but it is founded in the nature of things. Primary force, as such, primary fire, primary reason, constitute what is primarily God. Things into which this primary substance has changed itself are only divine in a derivative sense. Hence deity, which is ultimately identical with the whole of the world, may again be described as a part of the world, as the leading part (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν), as the Soul of the world, as the all-pervading fiery Breath. The distinction, however, is only a relative one. What is not immediately divine is nevertheless divine derivatively, as being a manifestation of primary fire; and if the soul of the world is not identical with the body, at least it pervades every part of that body. It is a distinction, too, which applies only to a part of the conditions of the world. At the end of every period, the sum of all derivative things reverts to the unity of the divine Being, and the distinction between what is originally and what is derivatively divine, in other words, the distinction between God and the world, ceases.

Boëthus alone dissented from the pantheism of the Stoics by making a real distinction between God and the world. Agreeing with the other Stoics in considering deity to be an ethereal Substance, he would not allow that it resided, as the Soul, within the whole world, and, consequently, he refused to call the world a living being. Instead of doing so, he placed the seat of deity in the highest of the heavenly spheres, the sphere of the fixed stars, and made it operate upon the world from this abode. The opposite view detracted, in his eyes, from the unchangeable and exalted character of the divine Being. How anxious he was to vindicate that character will also be seen in the way in which he differed from his fellow-Stoics in reference to the destruction of the world.