The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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Dear
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24 THE STOIC CREED
and that he was less under the sway of the spirit of
sect than many of his contemporaries. It is no easy
matter, in any age, for a partisan to see that a thinker s
first duty is
to be sympathetic towards other thinkers,
and ready to believe that there is truth even in systems
from which he himself dissents. If Zeno was com
paratively tolerant, that surely was a virtue, not a vice.
When he listened to and learned from the different
teachers of the diverse
tenets, he only showed that he
had in him the genuine spirit of the earnest seeker after
truth ;
and when he broke off from this teacher and
from that at particular points, and essayed to occupy
an independent position, he simply acted on the proper
philosophic maxim,
to me is Plato, but dearer
still is Truth (amicus Plato, magis arnica veritas)."
Nevertheless, the founders of Stoicism were perhaps
by nature, at all events from the pressure of circum
stances eager controversialists and
;
controversialists
were all their successors.
It was the fate of the school
to be constantly engaged in philosophical warfare.
One ground of polemic lay with Epicurus and the
Epicureans on the physical explanation of the nature
and constitution of the universe. Zeno possibly, and
Cleanthes certainly, entered the lists here ; but Chrysippus
was the combatant that stood forth pre-eminent.
To those protagonists
it seemed impossible that the
world should have arisen, as the Epicureans maintained
it did, by
a fortuitous concourse of atoms. That doc
trine appeared to give an erroneous idea of Providence,
and left the world an inexplicable riddle. Therefore,
it
had to be strenuously resisted,
Either an ordered