The Stoics had a tremendous reputation for logic. In this department
they were the successors or rather the supersessors of Aristotle. For
after the death of Theophrastus the library of the Lyceum is said to
have been buried underground at Scepsis until about a century before
Christ, So that the Organon may actually have been lost to the world
during that period. At all events under Strato the successor of
Theophrastus who specialized in natural science the school had lost
its comprehensiveness. Cicero even finds it consonant with dramatic
propriety to make Cato charge the later Peripatetics with ignorance
of logic! On the other hand Chrysippus became so famous for his logic
as to create a general impression that if there were a logic among
the gods it would be no other than the Chrysippean.
But if the Stoics were strong in logic they were weak in rhetoric.
This strength and weakness were characteristic of the school at all
periods. Cato is the only Roman Stoic to whom Cicero accords the
praise of real eloquence. In the dying accents of the school as we
hear them in Marcus Aurelius the imperial sage counts it a thing to
be thankful for that he had learnt to abstain from rhetoric, poetic,
and elegance of diction. The reader however cannot help wishing that
he had taken some means to diminish the crabbedness of his style. If
a lesson were wanted in the importance of sacrificing to the Graces
it might be found in the fact that the early Stoic writers despite
their logical subtlety have all perished and that their remains have
to be sought for so largely in the pages of Cicero. In speaking of
logic as one of the three departments of philosophy we must bear in
mind that the term was one of much wider meaning than it is with us.
It included rhetoric, poetic, and grammar as well as dialectic or
logic proper, to say nothing of disquisitions on the senses and the
intellect which we should now refer to psychology.
Logic as a whole being divided into rhetoric and dialectic: rhetoric
was defined to be the knowledge of how to speak well in expository
discourses and dialectic as the knowledge of how to argue rightly in
matters of question and answer. Both rhetoric and dialectic were
spoken of by the Stoics as virtues for they divided virtue in its
most generic sense in the same way as they divided philosophy into
physical, ethical, and logical. Rhetoric and dialectic were thus the
two species of logical virtue. Zeno expressed their difference by
comparing rhetoric to the palm and dialectic to the fist.
Instead of throwing in poetic and grammar with rhetoric, the Stoics
subdivided dialectic into the part which dealt with the meaning and
the part which dealt with the sound, or as Chrysippus phrased it,
concerning significants and significates. Under the former came the
treatment of the alphabet, of the parts of speech, of solecism, of
barbarism, of poems, of amphibolies, of metre and music--a list which
seems at first sight a little mixed, but in which we can recognise
the general features of grammar, with its departments of phonology,
accidence, and prosody. The treatment of solecism and barbarism in
grammar corresponded to that of fallacies in logic. With regard to
the alphabet it is worth noting that the Stoics recognised seven
vowels and six mutes. This is more correct than our way of talking of
nine mutes, since the aspirate consonants are plainly not mute. There
were, according to the Stoics, five parts of speech--name,
appellative, verb, conjunction, article. 'Name' meant a proper name,
and 'appellative' a common term.
There were reckoned to be five virtues of speech--Hellenism,
clearness, conciseness, propriety, distinction. By 'Hellenism' was
meant speaking good Greek. 'Distinction' was defined to be 'a diction
which avoided homeliness.' Over against these there were two
comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offence
against accidence, the other against syntax.
The famous comparison of the infant mind to a blank sheet of paper,
which we connect so closely with the name of Locke, really comes from
the Stoics. The earliest characters inscribed upon it were the
impressions of sense, which the Greeks called "phantasies." A
phantasy was defined by Zeno as "an impression in the soul."
Cleanthes was content to take this definition in its literal sense,
and believe that the soul was impressed by external objects as wax by
a signet ring. Chrysippus, however, found a difficulty here, and
preferred to interpret the Master's saying to mean an alteration or
change in the soul. He figured to himself the soul as receiving a
modification from every external object which acts upon it just as
the air receives countless strokes when many people are speaking at
once. Further, he declared that in receiving an impression the soul
was purely passive and that the phantasy revealed not only its own
existence, but that also of its cause, just as light displays itself
and the things that are in it. Thus, when through sight we receive an
impression of white, an affection takes place in the soul, in virtue
whereof we are able to say that there exists a white object affecting
us. The power to name the object resides in the understanding. First
must come the phantasy, and the understanding, having the power of
utterance, expresses in speech the affection it receives from the
object. The cause of the phantasy was called the "phantast," _e.
g._ the white or cold object. If there is no external cause, then
the supposed object of the impression was a "phantasm," such as a
figure in a dream, or the Furies whom Orestes sees in his frenzy.
How then was the impression which had reality behind it to be
distinguished from that which had not? "By the feel" is all that the
Stoics really had to say in answer to this question. Just as Hume
made the difference between sense-impressions and ideas to lie in the
greater vividness of the former, so did they; only Hume saw no
necessity to go beyond the impression, whereas the Stoics did.
Certain impressions, they maintained, carried with them an
irresistible conviction of their own reality, and this, not merely in
the sense that they existed; but also that they were referable to an
external cause. These were called "gripping phantasies." Such a
phantasy did not need proof of its own existence, or of that of its
object. It possessed self-evidence. Its occurrence was attended with
yielding and assent on the part of the soul. For it is as natural for
the soul to assent to the self-evident as it is for it to pursue its
proper good. The assent to a griping phantasy was called
"comprehension," as indicating the firm hold that the soul thus took
of reality. A gripping phantasy was defined as one which was stamped
and impressed from an existing object, in virtue of that object
itself, in such a way as it could not be from a non-existent object.
The clause "in virtue of that object itself" was put into the
definition to provide against such a case as that of the mad Orestes,
who takes his sister to be a Fury. There the impression was derived
from an existing object, but not from that object as such, but as
coloured by the imagination of the percipient.
The criterion of truth then was no other than the gripping phantasy.
Such at least was the doctrine of the earlier Stoics, but the later
added a saving clause, "when there is no impediment." For they were
pressed by their opponents with such imaginary cases as that of
Admetus, seeing his wife before him in very deed, and yet not
believing it to be her. But here there was an impediment. Admetus did
not believe that the dead could rise. Again Menelaus did not believe
in the real Helen when he found her on the island of Pharos. But here
again there was an impediment. For Menelaus could not have been
expected to know that he had been for ten years fighting for a
phantom. When, however, there was no such impediment, then they said
the gripping phantasy did indeed deserve its name, for it almost took
men by the hair of the head and dragged them to assent.
So far we have used "phantasy" only of real or imaginary impressions
of sense. But the term was not thus restricted by the Stoics, who
divided phantasies into sensible and not sensible. The latter came
through the understanding and were of bodiless things which could
only be grasped by reason. The ideas of Plato they declared existed
only in our minds. Horse, man, and animal had no substantial
existence but were phantasms of the soul. The Stoics were thus what
we should call Conceptualists.
Comprehension too was used in a wider sense than that in which we
have so far employed it. There was comprehension by the senses as of
white and black, of rough and smooth, but there was also
comprehension by the reason of demonstrative conclusions such as that
the gods exist and that they exercise providence. Here we are
reminded of Locke's declaration: "'Tis as certain there's a God as
that the opposite angles made by the intersection of two straight
lines are equal." The Stoics indeed had great affinities with that
thinker or rather he with them. The Stoic account of the manner in
which the mind arrives at its ideas might almost be taken from the
first book of Locke's _Essay_. As many as nine ways are
enumerated of which the first corresponds to simple ideas--
(1) by presentation, as objects of sense
(2) by likeness, as the idea of Socrates from his picture
(3) by analogy, that is, by increase or decrease, as ideas of giants
and pigmies from men, or as the notion of the centre of the earth,
which is reached by the consideration of smaller spheres.
(4) by transposition, as the idea of men with eyes in their breasts.
(5) by composition, as the idea of a Centaur.
(6) by opposition, as the idea of death from that of life.
(7) by a kind of transition, as the meaning of words and the idea of
place.
(8)by nature, as the notion of the just and the good
(9)by privation, as handless
The Stoics resembled Locke again in endeavoring to give such a
definition of knowledge as should cover at once the reports of the
senses and the relation between ideas. Knowledge was defined by them
as a sure comprehension or a habit in the acceptance of phantasies
which was not liable to be changed by reason. On a first hearing
these definitions might seem limited to sense knowledge but if we
bethink ourselves of the wider meanings of comprehension and of
phantasy, we see that the definitions apply as they were meant to
apply to the mind's grasp upon the force of a demonstration no less
than upon the existence of a physical object.
Zeno, with that touch of oriental symbolism which characterized him,
used to illustrate to his disciples the steps to knowledge by means
of gestures. Displaying his right hand with the fingers outstretched
he would say, "That is a phantasy," then contracting the fingers a
little, "That is assent," then having closed the fist, "That is
comprehension," then clasping the fist closely with the left hand, he
would add, "That is knowledge."
A notion which corresponds to our word concept was defined as a
phantasm of the understanding of a rational animal. For a notion was
but a phantasm as it presented itself to a rational mind. In the same
way so many shillings and sovereigns are in themselves but shillings
and sovereigns, but when used as passage money they become fare.
Notions were arrived at partly by nature, partly by teaching and
study. The former kind of notions were called preconceptions; the
latter went merely by the generic name.
Out of the general ideas which nature imparts to us, reason was
perfected about the age of fourteen, at the time when the voice--its
outward and visible sign--attains its full development, and when the
human animal is complete in other respects as being able to reproduce
its kind. Thus reason which united us to the gods was not, according
to the Stoics, a pre-existent principal, but a gradual development
out of sense. It might truly be said that with them the senses were
the intellect.
Being was confined by the Stoics to body, a bold assertion of which
we shall meet the consequences later. At present it is sufficient to
notice what havoc it makes among the categories. Of Aristotle's ten
categories it leaves only the first, Substance, and that only in its
narrowest sense of Primary Substance. But a substance or body might
be regarded in four ways--
(1) simply as a body
(2) as a body of a particular kind
(3) as a body in a particular state
(4) as a body in a particular relation.