The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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124 THE STOIC CREED
The obvious way of surmounting the difficulty is by
tacitly assuming that, in the atoms themselves, after
all, there is contained the germ of life and consciousness.
And this is what Epicureanism did ;
but it was done
illogically. Frequently does Lucretius apply
to atoms
such terms as
"
seeds,"
seeds of things," "procreative
matter (genitalis materies)"
concert (con
cilium)," generative concert," and so on ; and, as we
have seen, he endows them with "will." But this is
virtually to acknowledge that atoms (which he began
by maintaining to be absolutely dead things) and the
void are not, after all, sufficient to explain the whole
phenomena of our experience ; that, for the world as
we know it at all events, for the organic and conscious
parts of it there is needed a force or power other than
what is material (call it
by whatever name you please),
adequate to give the explanation of, or to account for,
the "inner design"
that life and mind, biological and
psychical facts alike, display. In other words, the
highest facts in our experience are not explicable by
the principles of Epicurean physics, but are simply
slurred over in it ;
and what plausibility the explana
tion possesses is got from the circumstance that it
assumes those higher facts in the lower, and thereby
obtains for the lower a greater potency than rightfully
belongs to them.
But the Epicurean Criterion of Truth what of it ?
Certainly, knowledge begins with sensation ;
Stoic
and Epicurean were agreed on that. But the Stoic
insisted that, although sensation is indispensable, it
cannot by itself explain experience to us, or show how