The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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CHAPTER XI
THEOLOGY AND RELIGION
Estne Dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aer
Et caelum et virtus? Superos quid quserimus ultra?
Juppiter est
quodcunque vides quodcunque moveris."
LUCAN.
"Cujus rei ordo est etiam praedictio
est." SENECA.
Nature s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike."
POPE.
are Thine offspring1
alone of mortal
, things that live and
walk the earth, moulded in image of the CLEANTHES.
All."
WE return now to the subject of ontology, or specula
which we so far considered already under
tion on being",
the heading of Physics, in Chapter V. ;
and we do so
with the advantage of approaching the problems through
a previous knowledge of the Stoic Ethics. For, as we
have seen, the ruling formula,
agreeably to
nature," is susceptible of a twofold interpretation, and,
according as we accept the one or the other, we are
brought face to face with the psychology of ethics or
with ethical ontology. If by nature we mean solely
or chiefly human nature, then the formula introduces us
to ethics as psychology
if we give
it the wider ;
significa
tion, and understand by it the world-order, then we have
presented to us ethics as metaphysics. Supposing,