Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

in i STOIC DOGMA liii
Epicurean in resolute materialism, his view opposes the
sharpest contrast to the atomic theory of being espoused
by the Epicureans. To the Epicureans life is mere
juxtaposition of atoms, which accident has combined,
and some other gust of accident will part ; to the Stoics
every form of being is an expression
of the cosmic
power, an energy correlated to all the other manifestations
of energy, among which it takes its place. The
total Universe is God; and a real and logical, not
merely sentimental, pantheism is attained. The conception,
as will be clear when approached from the
ethical side, at once gives guarantee and consciousness
of power, and also limits the exercise of that power
within the terms of cosmic solidarity. Will, the ex-
pression and the evidence of life, is not, as with
Epicurus, a caprice of swerving atoms, but a part of the
motions of a life larger than itself.
Stoicism was in the first instance content with its
monistic affirmation, and the method or process of
actualisation was not conceived very distinctly. It was
attributed to certain seminal principles (o-Tre/o/zariKot
Aoyot), centres or spores, as it were, of procreative activity,
at which an inner irresistible impulse of the generative
Reason erupted into spontaneous activity and realised
These
itself in appropriate forms of phenomenal being.
1
seminal reasons '
do not differ in substance from the
central Soul-force, but, as it were, exhibit and centralise
portions of its energy in time and place, and confer
upon the resultant form of being the specific character-
isation which constitutes its individuality. The term
) covering the ideas of Reason, definition, principle,