The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

LOGIC: THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 73
experience, the Stoics only did what the Cynics before
them and the Epicureans contemporaneously with them
did, and what modern psychologists are practically
unanimous in doing, and what is
necessary to be done
if the growth of the human mind, as disclosed to our
observation, is to be correctly represented. It is
through sense - impressions that the individual first \
becomes aware of himself, and not otherwise does he
of the external world and of his
gain a knowledge
fellow-men. But, in order to a full presentation of
the case, the "object" in sense-perception must be
analyzed far more carefully than it was by the Stoics,
and many things must be taken account of by the
genetic psychologist
that did not come within the
Stoic s ken. In the first place, Heredity, as psycho
logists have now come to see, is a potent
factor in
the determination and development of the individual
mind ;
and it forbids our regarding the mind in the
strict Stoical sense, as a clean tablet, a sheet of white
paper. Palimpsest would be a better figure, though
not perfect. The mind, at birth, brings with it the
.
impress of the past experience
of ancestors of the
race. The individual has transmitted to him, not only
nervous, but also mental predispositions, which count
for much. They are the a priori element in the mind,
which explains in part the rapidity with which he
progresses in knowledge and acquires such complex
conceptions as those of space and time. In the second
place, account must be taken of another social fact,
namely this, that the individual is born into a formed
language. No doubt, through his own experience,
the child learns a vast number of things that are
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