The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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128 THE STOIC CREED
were under the power of this impulse. The worth of
the individual, and his destiny, and how best he was to
achieve his perfection these were the points that
occupied the first place in the Stoic s interest. 1 Nor,
further, must we forget that if Plato was studied by
the Stoics as interpreted by his successors in the
Academy, there were sufficient grounds for refusing to
accept him as an unerring and satisfactory guide.
But, be the explanation what it
may, the fact
remains : Plato s was not an outstanding influence to
the Stoics. Nevertheless, he did to some extent affect
them that was inevitable. They accepted
tion of virtue as knowledge or insight ;
his defini
they reproduced
his doctrine of the cardinal virtues ; his anthropology
left traces on their teaching ; they were affected by
some of his sociological views as set forth in the
Republic and
; they shared with him the recognition of
the world as a living being and the conception of the
anima mundi.
Yet, even while accepting these views,
the Stoics modified and handled them in a fashion of
their own. Such an argument, for instance, as the
following, to prove that the world is rational, put into
the mouth of Zeno by Cicero (De Nat. Deor. ii. 8),
would sound strange in Plato : That which reasons is
superior to that which does not reason. But nothing
is superior to the world. Therefore, the world reasons."
Or this: Nothing that is itself destitute of life and
reason can generate a being possessed of life and
reason. But the world generates beings possessed of
life and reason.
Therefore, the world is itself possessed
1
Compare this with Christianity, when the individual again
emerges.