he
world, and therefore, order, harmony, beauty, and design. Secondly,
since reason is law as opposed to the lawless, it means that the
universe is {348} subject to the absolute sway of law, is governed by
the rigorous necessity of cause and effect.

Hence the individual is not free. There can be no true freedom of the
will in a world governed by necessity. We may, without harm, say that
we choose to do this or that, that our acts are voluntary. But such
phrases merely mean that we assent to what we do. What we do is none
the less governed by causes, and therefore by necessity.

The world-process is circular. God changes the fiery substance of
himself first into air, then water, then earth. So the world arises.
But it will be ended by a conflagration in which all things will
return into the primal fire. Thereafter, at a pre-ordained time, God
will again transmute himself into a world. It follows from the law of
necessity that the course taken by this second, and every subsequent,
world, will be identical in every way with the course taken by the
first world. The process goes on for ever, and nothing new ever
happens. The history of each successive world is the same as that of
all the others down to the minutest details.

The human soul is part of the divine fire, and proceeds into man from
God. Hence it is a rational soul, and this is a point of cardinal
importance in connexion with the Stoic ethics. But the soul of each
individual does not come direct from God. The divine fire was breathed
into the first man, and thereafter passes from parent to child in the
act of procreation. After death, all souls, according to some, but
only the souls of the good, according to others, continue in
individual existence until the general conflagration in which they,
and all else, return to God.

{349}

Ethics.

The Stoic ethical teaching is based upon two principles already
developed in their physics; first, that the universe is governed by
absolute law, which admits of no exceptions; and second, that the
essential nature of man is reason. Both are summed up in the famous
Stoic maxim, "Live according to nature." For this maxim has two
aspects. It means, in the first place, that men should conform
themselves to nature in the wider sense, that is, to the laws of the
universe, and secondly, that they should conform their actions to
nature in the narrower sense, to their own essential nature, reason.
These two expressions mea