The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY 57
subject-matter underwent change as time passed.
Hence it
may be proper here, although anticipating
what is to follow, to note briefly the steps or stages
in the development of Stoicism, following
the list of
founders and leaders as given at the end of Chapter II.
The general form of the system was fixed and deter
mined once for all by the three great founders, each of
whom, however, had his own way of enunciating and
emphasizing the doctrines. To Zeno the school is in
debted for its general physicaPtheory, for the value
attached to logic as propagdeutTc, and for the uncom
promising purity
of its ethics and the demand for
plain living and high thinking." Cleanthes stands
conspicuous as the religious interpreter of its physics,
poetically expressed, and, consequently, touched by
emotion yet of the calm contemplative kind, deeply
reverential and devoutly submissive to the world-order ;
and for his unqualified materialism and the stress he
laid on the principle of "strain "or "tension." The
logician par excellence is Chrysippus systematizing,
safeguarding, and controverting. This, however, is
specially to be observed, that, while, by one and
all, ethics was regarded as supreme, the other two
disciplines (logic and physics) were enthusiastically
cultivated. The founders were essentially dialecticians
as well as ethicists, and their moral theory rested on
metaphysical principles drawn from a reasoned study
of the universe.
By the presidents of the Middle Stoa the fundamental
doctrines were accepted and tenaciously held, but they