d the way for the Stoics in another direction.
This "reason," which in Socrates and Plato was already a deity, meant an
order, an order making for the good. It was the name for a principle
much like that which Aristotle called Nature, an indwelling prophetic
instinct by which things strive after their perfection and happiness.
Now Aristotle observed this instinct, as behoved a disciple of Socrates,
in its specific cases, in which the good secured could be discriminated
and visibly attained. There were many souls, each with its provident
function and immutable guiding ideal, one for each man and animal, one
for each heavenly sphere, and one, the prime mover, for the highest
sphere of all. But the Stoics, not trained in the same humane and
critical school, had felt the unity, of things more dramatically and
vaguely in the realm of physics. Like Xenophanes of old, they gazed at
the broad sky and exclaimed, "The All is One." Uniting these various
influences, they found it easy to frame a conception of Zeus, or the
world, or the universal justice and law, so as to combine in it a
dynamic unity with a provident reason. A world conceived to be material
and fatally determined was endowed with foresight of its own changes,
perfect internal harmony, and absolute moral dignity. Thus mythology,
with the Stoics, ended in pantheism.

[Sidenote: The ideal surrendered before the physical.]

By reducing their gods to a single divine influence, and identifying
this in turn with natural forces, the Stoics had, in one sense, saved
mythology. For no one would be inclined to deny existence or power to
the cosmos, to the body the soul of which was Zeus. Pantheism, taken
theoretically, is only naturalism poetically expressed. It therefore was
a most legitimate and congenial interpretation of paganism for a
rationalistic age. On the other hand, mythology had not been a mere
poetic physics; it had formulated the object of religion; it had
embodied for mankind its highest ideals in worshipful forms. It was when
this religious function was transferred to the god of pantheism that the
paradox and impossibility of the reform became evident. Nature neither
is nor can be man's ideal. The substitution of nature for the
traditional and ideal object of religion involves giving nature moral
authority over man; it involves that element of Stoicism which is the
synonym of inhumanity. Life and death, good and ill fortune, happiness
and misery, since they fl