of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of thy being." There goes with this, in spite of his
position in the Roman State, the Stoic belief in the human race as one community: "My city and
country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man, it is the world." There is the
difficulty that one finds in all Stoics, of reconciling determinism with the freedom of the will.
"Men exist for the sake of one another," he says, when he is thinking of his duty as ruler. "The
wickedness of one man does no harm to another," he says on the same page, when he is thinking
of the doctrine that the virtuous will alone is good. He never inferred that the goodness of one man
does no good to another, and that he would do no harm to anybody but himself if he were as bad
an Emperor as Nero; and yet this conclusion seems to follow.
"It is peculiar to man," he says, "to love even those who do wrong. And this happens if, when they
do wrong, it occurs to thee that they are kinsmen, and that they do wrong through ignorance and
unintentionally, and that soon both of you will die; and above all, that the wrong-doer has done
thee no harm, for he has not made thy ruling faculty worse than it was before."
And again: "Love mankind. Follow God.... And it is enough to remember that Law rules all."
These passages bring out very clearly the inherent contradictions in Stoic ethics and theology. On
the one hand, the universe is a rigidly deterministic single whole, in which all that happens is the
result of previous causes. On the other hand, the individual will is completely autonomous, and no
man can be forced to sin by outside causes. This is one contradiction, and there is a second closely
connected with it. Since the will is autonomous, and the virtuous will alone is good, one man
cannot do either good or harm to another; therefore benevolence is an illusion. Something must be
said about each of these contradictions.
The contradiction between free will and determinism is one of those that run through philosophy
from early times to our own day, taking different forms at different times. At present it is the Stoic
form that concerns us.
I think that a Stoic, if we could make him submit to a Socratic interrogation, would defend his
view more or less as follows: The universe is a single animate Being, having a soul which may
also be