of all things. The earlier Stoics, Zeno and Chrysippus,
entertained high reverence for the divination, prophecy, and omens that
were generally current in the ancient world. They considered that these
were the methods whereby the gods were graciously pleased to make known
beforehand revelations of their foreordained purposes. (Herein lay one
among the marked points of contrast between Stoics and Epicureans.)
They held this foreordination even to the length of fatalism, and made
the same replies, as have been given in modern times, to the difficulty
of reconciling it with the existence of evil, and with the apparent
condition of the better and the worse individuals among mankind. They
offered explanations such as the following: (1) God is the author of
all things except wickedness; (2) the very nature of good supposes its
contrast evil, and the two are inseparable, like light and dark, (which
may be called the argument from Relativity); (3) in the enormous extent
of the Universe, some things must be neglected; (4) when evil happens
to the good, it is not as a punishment, but as connected with a
different dispensation; (5) parts of the world may be presided over by
evil demons; (6) what we call evil may not be evil.

Like most other ancient schools, the Stoics held God to be corporeal
like man:--Body is the only substance; nothing incorporeal could act on
what is corporeal; the First Cause of all, God or Zeus, is the primeval
fire, emanating from which is the soul of man in the form of a warm
ether.

It is for human beings to recognize the Universe as governed by
universal Law, and not only to raise their minds to the comprehension
of it, but to enter into the views of the administering Zeus or Fate,
who must regard all interests equally; we are to be, as it were, in
harmony with him, to merge self in universal Order, to think only of
that and its welfare. As two is greater than one, the interests of the
whole world are infinitely greater than the interests of any single
being, and no one should be satisfied with a regard to anything less
than the whole. By this elevation of view, we are necessarily raised
far above the consideration of the petty events befalling ourselves.
The grand effort of human reason is thus to rise to the abstraction or
totality of entire Nature; 'no ethical subject,' says Chrysippus,
'could be rightly approached except from the pre-consideration of
entire Nature, and the ordering of the whole.'