Like most other ancient schools, the Stoics held God to be corporeal like man: body is the only substance: nothing incorporeal could'act on what is corporeal; the first cause of all, God or Zeus, is the primeval fire, emanating from which is the soul of man in the form of a warm ether.
It is fqr human beings to recognize the universe as governed by universal law, and not only to raise their minds to the comprehension of it, but, to enter into the views of the Creator, who must regard all interests equally; we are to be, as it were, in league with him, to merge self in the universal order, to think only of that, and its welfare. As two is greater than one, the interests of the whole world are infinitely greater than the interests of any single being, and no one should be satisfied with a regard to any thing less than the whole. By this elevation of view we are necessarily raised far above the consideration of the petty events befalling ourselves. The grand effort of human reason is thus to rise to the abstraction or totality of entire nature; " No ethical subject," says Chrysipptis, "could he rightly approached except from the preconsideration of entire nature, and the ordering of the whole." As to immortality, the Stoics precluded themselves, by holding the theory of the absorption of the individual soul at death into the divine essence; but, on the other hand, their doctrine of advance and aspiration is what has in all times been the main natural argument for the immortality of the soul. For the most part, they kept themselves undecided as to this great doctrine, giving it as an alternative, reasoning as to our con duct on either supposition, and submitting to the pleasure of God in this as in all other things.
In arguing for the existence of divine power and government, they employed what has been called the argument from design, which is as old as Socrates. Man is conscious that lie is in himself an intellectual or spiritual power, from which, by analogy, he is led to believe that a greater power pervades the universe, as intellect pervades humanity.
II. Next, as to the constitution of the mind. We have bodies like animals, but reason or intelligence, like the gods. Animals have instinctive principles of action; man alone
has a rational intelligent soul. According to Antonius, we mine into contact with Deity by our intellectual part, and our highest life is thus the divine life.
But the most important Stoical doctrine respecting the nature of man is the recogni tion of reason as a superior power or faculty that subordinates all the rest—the governing intelligence. (Very nearly the same phraseology is used by bishop Butler in setting forth the supremacy of conscience.) This, however, is not a mere intellectual principle, but an active force, uniting intellect and•will. The bodily sensibilities are opposed to this higher reason and will, which, however, is strong enough to control them. Another way of expressing the same view was the power of the mind over the body, which was dwelt upon by Epictetus in the most exaggerated form. The introduction of so glaring a mistake as that sickness may affect the body without enfeebling the mind could only end in piamtical failures, or else in contradiction.
In order to maintaiu their contrast with the Epicureans, the Stoics said that pleasure and pain are not principles of nature; by which they must have meant that humanity is not in fact, at least exclusively, governed by these, and that, in the regenerated man, they are not governing principles at all. Now, it is true, and a truth important for many practical purposes, that we are sometimes impelled to action without reference to our pleasures and pains; our habits often exemplify this state; it is still better shown in what are called "fixed ideas," as in involuntary imitation and sympathy. But these are exceptions; and any system that sets itself against the main fact that pleasure and pain arc the great moving forces of mankind must somewhere or other contradict itself.
In Seneca we find something very closely approaching to the Christian doctrine of the corruption of human nature. The littleness of humanity was a favorite theme of Autonius, and naturally followed from the Stoical mode of contemplating the universe at large.