THREE:And he told us, on the beach, hed been here this morning, Sandy whispered to himself.
THREE:In returning to one of the older cosmologies, the Stoics placed themselves in opposition to the system of Aristotle as a whole, although on questions of detail they frequently adopted his conclusions. The object of Heracleitus, as against the Pythagoreans, had been to dissolve away every antithesis in a pervading unity of contradictories; and, as against the Eleatics, to substitute an eternal series of transformations for the changeless unity of absolute existence. The Stoics now applied the same method on a scale proportionate to the subsequent development of thought. Aristotle had carefully distinguished God from the world, even to the extent of isolating him from all share in its creation and interest in its affairs. The Stoics declared that God and the world were one. So far, it is allowable to call them pantheists. Yet their pantheism was very different from what we are accustomed to denote by that name; from the system of Spinoza, for example. Their strong faith in final causes and in Providencea faith in which they closely followed Socrateswould be hardly consistent with anything but the ascription of a distinct and individual consciousness to the Supreme Being, which is just what modern pantheists refuse to admit. Their God was sometimes described as the soul of the world, the fiery element surrounding and penetrating every other kind of matter. What remained was the body of God; but it was a body which he had originally created out of his own substance, and would, in the fulness of time, absorb into that substance again.25 Thus they kept the future conflagration foretold by Heracleitus, but gave it a more religious colouring. The process of creation was then to begin over again, and all things were to run the same12 course as before down to the minutest particulars, human history repeating itself, and the same persons returning to live the same lives once more.26 Such a belief evidently involved the most rigid fatalism: and here again their doctrine offers a pointed contrast to that of Aristotle. The Stagirite, differing, as it would seem, in this respect from all the older physicists, maintained that there was an element of chance and spontaneity in the sublunary sphere; and without going very deeply into the mechanism of motives or the theory of moral responsibility, he had claimed a similar indeterminateness for the human will. Stoicism would hear of neither; with it, as with modern science, the chain of causation is unbroken from first to last, and extends to all phenomena alike. The old theological notion of an omnipotent divine will, or of a destiny superior even to that will, was at once confirmed and continued by the new theory of natural law; just as the predestination of the Reformers reappeared in the metaphysical rationalism of Spinoza.27
THREE:
TWO:For other kinds of work there are drawings furnished, and the plans are dictated by the engineering department of machinery-building establishments, but pattern-makers make their own plans for constructing their work, and have even to reproduce the drawings of the fitting-shop to work from. Nearly everything pertaining to patterns is left to be decided by the pattern-maker, who, from the same drawings, and through the exercise of his judgment alone, may make patterns that are durable and expensive, or temporary and cheap, as the probable extent of their use may determine.Yet, while the Stoics were far from anticipating the methods of modern Utilitarianism, they were, in a certain sense, strict Utilitariansthat is to say, they measured the goodness or badness of actions by their consequences; in other words, by39 their bearing on the supposed interest of the individual or of the community. They did not, it is true, identify interest with pleasure or the absence of pain; but although, in our time, Hedonism and Utilitarianism are, for convenience, treated as interchangeable terms, they need not necessarily be so. If any one choose to regard bodily strength, health, wealth, beauty, intellect, knowledge, or even simple existence, as the highest good and the end conduciveness to which determines the morality of actions, he is a Utilitarian; and, even if it could be shown that a maximum of happiness would be ensured by the attainment of his end, he would not on that account become a Hedonist. Now it is certain that the early Stoics, at least, regarded the preservation of the human race as an end which rightfully took precedence of every other consideration; and, like Charles Austin, they sometimes pushed their principles to paradoxical or offensive extremes, apparently for no other purpose than that of affronting the common feelings of mankind,84 without remembering that such feelings were likely to represent embodied experiences of utility. Thusapart from their communistic theoriesthey were fond of specifying the circumstances in which incest would become legitimate; and they are said not only to have sanctioned cannibalism in cases of extreme necessity, but even to have recommended its introduction as a substitute for burial or cremation; although this, we may hope, was rather a grim illustration of what they meant by moral indifference than a serious practical suggestion.85
TWO:III."A question that can never be solved," the Countess gasped.