The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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44 THE STOIC CREED
doctrine of Habit are eminently psychological. They
had, also, a distinct psychology of Pleasure ;
maintain
ing that pleasure indicates, not the fulness and vigour,
but the decline of vital energy, the point where the
climax has been reached, and where descent and decay
begin, while, in the interests of virtue, they confined
pleasure to the lower psychical energies, chiefly the
sensuous, and refused to allow it
any application to
the higher energies of the soul at all. Psychological,
furthermore, is the basis of Religion with them, and
their main argument for the existence of God that
which grounds
it in human nature. So that, para
doxical though it may appear, the Stoics must be
pronounced to be in the first instance psychologists,
even though they have no separate place for psychology
in their scheme of the sciences. 1
This being understood, let
us proceed
to the first of
the Stoical sciences namely, Logic. It is rightly called
the first, because Zeno himself so it :
regarded his
arrangement, rising in the order of importance, was
Logic, Physics, Ethics. 2 But it is first also, because
the Stoics, with rare insight, looked upon
it as the
1
Hence, a work of Stein s on the Stoics is entitled Die Psychologie
der Stoa.
2
This order, however, was not always followed, for, as Diogenes
Laertius tells us (vii. 33), some Stoics maintain that no part is to
be preferred to another, but they are all
mingled together and so
are handled indiscriminately (r-r/v jrap&ooa i.v (JLLKT^V eiroiovv) while
;
others place logic first, and physics second, and ethics third, as
Zeno in his treatise On Reason, and Chrysippus and Archedemus
and Endromus. For Diogenes of Ptolemais begins with ethics,
but Apollodorus puts ethics second, and Pansetius and Posidonius
begin with physics."