THREE:In reality, Stoicism was not, like the older Greek philosophies, a creation of individual genius. It bears the character of a compilation both on its first exposition and on its final completion. Polemo, who had been a fine gentleman before he became a philosopher, taunted Zeno with filching his opinions from every quarter, like the cunning little Phoenician trader that he was.18 And it was said that the seven hundred treatises of Chrysippus would be reduced to a blank if everything that he had borrowed from others were to be erased. He seems, indeed, to have been the father of review-writers, and to have used the reviewer��s right of transcription with more than modern license. Nearly a whole tragedy of Euripides reappeared in one of his ��articles,�� and a wit on being asked what he was reading, replied, ��the Medea of Chrysippus.��19

FORE:This absolute separation of Form and Matter, under their new names of Thought and Extension, once grasped, various principles of Cartesianism will follow from it by logical necessity. First comes the exclusion of final causes from philosophy, or rather from Nature. There was not, as with Epicurus, any anti-theological feeling concerned in their rejection. With Aristotle, against whom Descartes is always protesting, the final cause was not a mark of designing intelligence imposed on Matter from without; it was only a particular aspect of Form, the realisation of what Matter was always striving after by virtue of its inherent potentiality. When Form was conceived only as pure thought, there could be no question of such a process; the most highly organised bodies being only modes of figured extension. The revival of Atomism had, no doubt, a great deal to do with the preference for a mechanical interpretation of life. Aristotle had himself shown with masterly clearness the difference between his view of Nature and that taken by Democritus; thus indicating beforehand the direction in which an alternative to his own teaching might be sought; and Bacon had, in fact, already referred with approval to the example set by Democritus in dealing with teleological enquiries.I roamed about aimlessly in a scorching heat. Whither? I did not know myself. I did not know Louvain and met nobody whom I might ask something. I came near a couple of streets that were only ruins; the walls collapsed against each other and filled the roadway with rubbish, so that sometimes I could not see whether I walked on or beside the place where the houses used to stand. FORE:I do not refer to questions of mechanical construction, although the remark might be true if applied in this sense, but to the kind of devices that may be best employed in certain cases.