hospitans. The popular mythology of the day was entirely rejected by the Stoics, although, as Professor Mahaffy points out, they never attempted to “discredit orthodoxy,” but, on the contrary, used its myths and ceremonies with the utmost reverence as vehicles of profound religious truths. But they certainly believed in intelligences above man, yet below the one Supreme Being; thus the stars and the lightning (the reader will observe the allusions in the Hymn of Cleanthes) are in some sense divinities, by virtue of the supposed purity of their fiery essence.

Thus from the one primitive divine element the Kosmos, with all its hierarchy of being, is evolved. But in the Stoic system πάντα ῥεῖ,3 there is no continuance in any one condition. As in the normal life of all earthly creatures there comes a certain climax or turning point, after which the forces of decay gain slowly but surely on those of growth and resistance, so also runs the history of the universe which includes them all. One by one the steps by which it was formed shall be retraced, and the derived substances which compose it consumed and re-absorbed by that from which they sprang. From matter in its grossest form to its purest, from earth and stone and water to the highest intelligence in men and dæmons and Gods, nothing shall escape this doom of dissolution; everything shall yield up its separate existence, until at last the indestructible element of that primeval fire is again the sole being that remains, and Zeus is “alone in the conflagration,” self-contemplating in the solitudes of thought. But this is not the end. There is no end. The plastic impulse again resumes its sway, and soon another cycle of world-development and world-destruction begins to run its course. In the language of Seneca, “When that fatal day, that necessity of the times, shall have arrived, and it seems good to God to make an end of old things and ordain the better, then shall the ancient order be revoked and every creature be generated anew, and a race ignorant of guilt be given to the earth.”

This was the general physical system on which all Stoics were agreed, although there were differences of opinion upon minor points; such as how far these successive cycles resembled each other? some asserting that they did so in the minutest detail, others only in their larger features. It was a system, for all its superstitions, not without grandeur and truth. At bottom it expressed a sense of that phenomenon of ebb and flow, systole and diastole, the action and counteraction of balanced forces, which is perhaps the profoundest law of life.

Two questions arise in connection with the Stoic cosmogony, which we must briefly discuss before proceeding farther. Are we justified in terming their view of the universe a materialistic one? and what was their doctrine of the destinies of the human soul? Now it is certainly the usual practice among writers on philosophy to reckon the Stoics as materialists, and it is unquestionably true that they denied the possibility of any existence which was not corporeal. Strong as they are on the supremacy of the human soul over the human body, sharp as is the line with which they divide these elements, yet the distinction is a moral, not a metaphysical one—each is an actual material substance. But we shall be seriously mistaken, nevertheless, if we place them in the same class with the scientific materialists of the present day. According to the latter, Thought is no necessary moment in the universe, but merely a product of certain accidental combinations of matter, a product which, when these are dissolved, must disappear from existence, without leaving a trace of its presence behind. Again, according to most modern opponents of the materialistic view, Thought has an independent and immortal being—it existed before matter was, and would continue to exist if all matter were annihilated. The Stoic view differed from each of these modern theories. It held Thought and Matter to be eternal, inseparable, and, indeed, strictly identical. Being in its primitive and purest form was fire, a corporeal substance, but one exhibiting consciousness, purpose, will.

As to the question of the Stoic view of the immortality of the human soul, it does not seem to me to deserve so much discussion as it has received from some commentators. It is obvious that the soul must, in the end, share the lot of all other existences, and be resolved into the Divine Being which was its source. The only question that can arise is whether this resolution takes place at the moment of death, or whether the sense of personal identity persists for a certain period beyond that event; and this question, which Epictetus appears to have been wise enough to leave an open one, is philosophically of very little importance. The soul is immortal, the individual perishes; this is the conclusion of Stoicism, and if we know this, there is little else it can much concern us to know.

The reader who desires to gain a thorough knowledge of Hellenistic philosophy, and of the social and political conditions in which it throve, will find what he seeks in two works to which I have to express my large indebtedness. One is Zeller’s Philosophie der Griechen (Epikureer, Stoiker u. Skeptiker),4 a monument of German research and erudition, in which vast masses of original material for the study of this most interesting, but neglected, epoch of the development of European intellect have been brought together, and interpreted with more than German lucidity and method. The other is Professor Mahaffy’s recent volume, Greek Life and Thought, a study of the Hellenistic period in various aspects, which the scholar will not read without profit, nor the lay-reader without pleasure.

We turn now to that department of the Stoic philosophy with which the reader of Epictetus is most concerned—its Ethics.

The ethical question resolves itself into a search for the supreme object of human endeavor, the Summum Bonum, the absolute and essential good. This, for the Stoic, embodied itself in the formula, “to live according to Nature.” But what is Nature? The will of God, as revealed in the heart and conscience of those who seek to know it, and interpreted through the observation in a reverent and faithful spirit of the facts of life.

Going into the subject more precisely we find certain criteria of moral truth established, προλήψεις, as they were called, that is, primitive, original conceptions, or, as I have rendered them in my translation, “natural conceptions,” dogmas by which all moral questions can be tried. If we inquire into the source of these προλήψεις, we shall find ourselves mistaken in our disposition to think that the Stoics regarded them as innate ideas. Innate they are not, for the Stoics held the soul at birth to be a tabula rasa, or blank page, which only experience could fill with character and meaning. But as Seneca says in his inquiry, “Quomodo ad nos prima boni honestique notitia pervenerit,”5 although Nature alone could not teach us these things, could not equip us with the knowledge of them before we entered upon life, yet the “seeds” of this