The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

PREDECESSORS OF STOICS IN ETHICS 129
of life and reason." The poetic glow of a great
imagination (working by intuition and suggestion
rather than by analysis) is here replaced by dry logical
ratiocination : the cramped view of the formal dia
lectician takes the place of the wide synthetic sweep of
the philosopher.
As with Plato, so with Aristotle. Although
Aristotle s physics and his logic left their mark on
Stoicism (the latter more especially through Chrysippus),
and although
it would not be difficult to trace the
working of his psychology in the Stoic handling of the
human impulses and desire, his ethics had only a very
limited influence. Indeed, the distinctive Aristotelian
positions such as, that virtue is a habit,
1
and that it
resides in the mean, and that it
requires favouring
fortune (good health, external goods, and such like)
for its proper development could not well fit into the
Stoical scheme. They were necessarily uncongenial to
thinkers who dealt so largely with the ideal of virtue
(non-empirically constructed), and whose object was to
raise men to a platform where worldly prudence and
calculation of consequences and dependence upon
fortune and environment were waived aside.
Moreover, with Aristotle intellect or contemplation
was the chief thing, and he held it to be the highest
aim of man to achieve the contemplative disposition.
That he regarded as the characteristic of the philosopher;
"
and he thought that the highest aim for a State was
to turn out philosophers, and that the
highest aim for
1 Of course, the Stoics recognized
character.
habit in the formation of