The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
"
ii2
THE STOIC CREED
ent to the sorrows and the hardships and the fate of
men.
"
The gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm !
The apparent design manifest in the universe is
explicable on purely naturalistic principles.
For,
certainly, not by design (nam certe neque consilio] did
the primary elements of things dispose themselves each
in their own order, after sage deliberation (sagaci
mente}) nor, indeed, did they settle by agreement what
motions each should produce but because, on account
;
of their great number and the variety of the changes
that they undergo, they are for an indefinite length of
time agitated, through the excitation of blows all the
world over, they do at length, after having experienced
every kind of motion and combination, settle into those
positions, whereby this world of ours is
produced and
exists"
(Lucretius, i. 121-128). . . . "For,"
he says
in another place (v. 187-194),
"the
primary elements
of things were so many in number, and excited by
blows in so many ways, through untold time, and were
accustomed so to be borne and carried forward by their
own weight and to meet in all manners and to make
all kinds of trial of what their
combinations might be
able to effect, that it is not surprising if they
fell at last
into such positions and acquired such motions as those
by which this universe of things, by renovation, is
carried on."
now