The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
PHYSICS: NATURE, GOD, THE SOUL 95
of ours that the good is corporeal (corpus], because
what is
good acts, and whatever acts is corporeal."
1
Here, again, nothing derogatory is implied in
designating
the soul material. Man s mind has a
passive and an active side. But, as ethics and
knowledge both repose on the mind s activity, the
Stoical materialism is practically innocuous. >
It is worth remarking, however, that although
the soul s materiality follows deductively from the
materiality of the primal fire, nevertheless the Stoics,
true to their experiential tendencies, based it also on
certain observed facts. Thus, Cleanthes argued that
it was proved (a) by the circumstance that not only
bodily qualities, but also mental capacity,
are trans
mitted by ordinary generation from parent to child ;
and (b) by the sympathy of the soul with the body
seen in the fact that, when the body is struck or cut,
the soul is
pained and when
;
the soul is torn by anxiety
or depressed by care, the body is correspondingly
affected. 2
Further, the Stoic eschatology calls for remark.
According to the doctrine of reabsorption into the
primal fire, everything is indestructible though a
:
thing may change its form, itself persists. The human
soul, therefore, is in this sense immortal. But about
this reabsorption of the soul, there are several unex
plained difficulties in Stoicism :
1
Seneca, Ep. 1 17.
These arguments were reproduced afterwards among- early
Christians by Tertullian, in support of his doctrine of the
traducianist origin of the soul.