The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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ETHICS: SPECIAL POINTS 183
"This do, my Lucilius, vindicate thy dignity (vindica
te tibi)"
1
They counselled, also, in the spirit of a rational ethic,
rather than in the merely sentimental fashion of the
present day, kindness to the lower animals. Naturally
enough, in conformity with their system, the brute
creation was conceived as being subservient to the uses
of man. As the Stoic physics was geocentric, so the
ethic was homocentric :
Is it not palpable that the
lower forms exist for the higher, and the higher for one
another? And things with breath of life are higher
than things without ;
and things with reason than with
breath alone"
(Aurelius, Med. v. 16). But they said,
*
You have reason ; unreasoning creatures and the world
of material things have none : therefore in your deal
ings with them rise superior and free (ibid. vi. 23).
As another consequence of their appreciation of man s
worth, they maintained the indissoluble connexion be
tween ethics and religion. The law of the universe, they
held, is the law of God; and the bindingness of morality
on us is the bindingness of rationality, echoing or repro
ducing the divine reason. And
even human laws, they
taught, are to be obeyed by men because they are not
arbitrary enactments of the individual with a view to
his own selfish
ends, but embodiments of the universal
reason subservient to the interests of the whole.
Law,
therefore, is one with God ;
at all events, where law is,
God is.
Jurisprudence, as much as cosmic order, or the
rational conduct of the individual, implies the Deity :
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"the seat of law,"
as Hooker afterwards put it, is the
bosom of Almighty God."
1
Heracleitus, too, had said that
Seneca, Ep. \.