The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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ETHICS: SPECIAL POINTS 175
nature" be taken in its wider sense, as designating
the whole, then the life that is counselled in the injunction
"live
agreeably to nature" is that of law and order,
conscious and willing conformity to the processes of
the universe, to the general course of things ;
and as
the order of nature (in this sense) is conceived by the
Stoic as rational, it means submission to reason in all
the modes of its manifestation. If, on the other hand,
"nature" be interpreted as human nature, then the
phrase is equally intelligible, if we avoid the Cynic error
of making savage and uncultured nature the type, and
place the type in developed civilized nature, and
especially in man s ideals and aspirations. The meaning
now is,
that man has a distinct place in the world, as a
social being endowed with reason is a member of a
corporate whole whose good is the supreme end and in
which the individual s good is inseparably bound up.
He is thus conceived as a complex of many powers and
principles, duly graded, with the supremacy accorded
to conscience or the practical reason. That is the con
ception of a system or constitution that Butler afterwards
so lucidly defined. 1
Viewing the matter thus, the Stoic
raised no question as to the legitimacy of the hierarchy
of principles that human nature disclosed. He was
undisturbed, on the one hand, by any troublesome
problems about origin, such as have perplexed later
moralists (origin of moral ideas and guiding axioms),
and, on the other hand, by any doctrine of evolution
biological or other. He took his stand firmly on the
empirical position ; accepting human nature as some
thing given, which it was his duty to analyze and try
1
See Preface to his Sermons.