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FORE:The last alternative seems the most probable. Nature with the Stoics was a fixed objective order whereby all things work together as co-operant parts of a single system. Each has a certain office to perform, and the perfect performance of it is the creatures virtue, or reason, or highest good: these three expressions being always used as strictly synonymous terms. Here we have the teleology, the dialectics, and the utilitarianism of Socrates, so worked out and assimilated that they differ only as various aspects of a single truth. The three lines of Socratic teaching had also been drawn to a single point by Plato; but his idealism had necessitated the creation of a new world for their development and concentration. The idea of Nature as it had grown up under the hands of Heracleitus, the Sophists, and Antisthenes, supplied Zeno with a ready-made mould into which his reforming aspirations could be run. The true Republic was not a pattern laid up in heaven, nor was it restricted to the narrow dimensions of a single Hellenic state. It was the whole real universe, in every part of which except in the works of wicked men a divine law was recognised and obeyed.46 Nay, according to Cleanthes, Gods law is obeyed even by the wicked, and the essence of morality consists only in its voluntary fulfilment. As others20 very vividly put it, we are like a dog tied under a cart; if we do not choose to run we shall be dragged along.47The words last quoted, which in a Christian sense are true enough, lead us over to the contrasting view of Aristotles theology, to the false theory of it held by critics like Prof. St. George Mivart. The Stagirite agrees with Catholic theism in accepting a personal God, and he agrees with the First Article of the English Church, though not with the Pentateuch, in saying that God is without parts or passions; but there his agreement ceases. Excluding such a thing as divine interference with nature, his theology of course excludes the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles, and grace. Nor is this a mere omission; it is a necessity of the system. If there can353 be no existence without time, no time without motion, no motion without unrealised desire, no desire without an ideal, no ideal but eternally self-thinking thoughtthen it logically follows that God, in the sense of such a thought, must not interest himself in the affairs of men. Again, Aristotelianism equally excludes the arguments by which modern theologians have sought to prove the existence of God. Here also the system is true to its contemporaneous, statical, superficial character. The First Mover is not separated from us by a chain of causes extending through past ages, but by an intervening breadth of space and the wheels within wheels of a cosmic machine. Aristotle had no difficulty in conceiving what some have since declared to be inconceivable, a series of antecedents without any beginning in time; it was rather the beginning of such a series that he could not make intelligible to himself. Nor, as we have seen, did he think that the adaptation in living organisms of each part to every other required an external explanation. Far less did it occur to him that the production of impressions on our senses was due to the agency of a supernatural power. It is absolutely certain that he would have rejected the Cartesian argument, according to which a perfect being must exist if it be only conceivableexistence being necessarily involved in the idea of perfection.252 Finally, not recognising such a faculty as conscience, he would not have admitted it to be the voice of God speaking in the soul.
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