Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

in 2 STOIC DOGMA lix
2. Cosmic Pantheism
The thought of the world as a living organism had
early found a place in philosophy, and was indeed the
philosophical restatement of that animism, which seems
almost the instinctive assumption in man's first guesses
at an explanation of phenomena. It was as natural to
attribute personal life to the Universe at large as to
Sun and Star, Ocean and River, tree and spring. But
the progress of Greek thought tended to discredit this
theory of the universe, and to exclude it from the
Schools by substituting either the purely mechanical
explanations of the Ionian School, which culminated
in the atomic theory of Democritus, or by inferring the
existence of a creative power exterior to the action of
phenomena. The reversion of Zeno to an explanation,
which had virtually fallen out of Greek consideration,
suggests importation from without,
to which the after-
thought of combination with Heraclitean physics is
by no means adverse. Whatever be the truth of this,
it seems clear that Zeno did not argue up to monistic
or pantheistic belief from Hellenic premises of thought,
but that his main affirmation was rather a sudden and
daring postulate, assumed as a theory of things, and then
gradually substantiated or corroborated, partly by himself
and partly by his successors, as the one intelligible reading
of phenomena regarded as a whole.
Stoicism was assimilative rather than derivative ; the
strength of the system lies in coherence rather than in
a priori proof, and rests less on central stability than