The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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LOGIC: THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 81
yourselves who confute the senses act otherwise ?
Which of you, wishing to enter a bath, ever went into
a mill ?
(Diss. i. 27).
Some have asserted that there is an incompatibility
between the Stoic doctrine of pre-conceptions or natural
notions and that of the sense origin of knowledge.
But, in reality, there is no such incompatibility, unless
we interpret pre-conceptions as literal innate ideas
which was not what the Stoics intended. It
might be
a valid objection to say that this natural power of
forming concepts is incompatible with thoroughgoing
materialism, but that is a different affair. If mind
is essentially active, there is no inconsistency in hold
ing that its activity is first elicited by and exercised
upon material supplied by the senses, and yet that
itself has the power of reading the hidden meaning
of this material of apprehending truth, as well as
reality.
Objection has also been taken to the Stoic test of a
pre-conception. That test is consensus gentium, the
general or universal consent of mankind. This, it has
been said, is to appeal to mere vulgar or uncriticized
opinion ; and it is, moreover, inconsistent with the
Stoic s contempt for the plain man, whom he regarded
as other than a wise man.
But by universal consent the Stoics did not mean
the consent of everybody throughout the world and
throughout the ages, without exception. They quite
well knew that there were people who will deny any
thing ;
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and of such people they had ample experience in