bstance. The
Stoics, therefore, regarded all existence as reducible, in its last
analysis, to _one substance_, which on the side of its passivity and
capacity of change, they called _hyle_ (yle);[828] and on the side of
its changeless energy and immutable order, they called God. The
corporeal world--physical nature--is "a peculiar manifestation" of God,
generated from his own substance, and, after certain periods, absorbed
in himself. Thus God, considered in the evolution of His power, is
nature. And nature, as attached to its immanent principle, is called
God.[829] The fundamental doctrine of the Stoics was a spiritual, ideal,
intellectual pantheism, of which the proper formula is, _All things are
God, but God is not all things_.

[Footnote 828: Or "matter." A good deal of misapprehension has arisen
from confounding the intellectual yle of Aristotle and the Stoics with
the gross physical "matter" of the modern physicist. By "matter" we now
understand that which is corporeal, tangible, sensible; whereas by yle,
Aristotle and the Stoics (who borrowed the term from him) understood
that which is incorporeal, intangible, and inapprehensible to sense,--an
"unknown something" which must necessarily be _supposed_ as the
condition of the existence of things. The _formal_ cause of Aristotle is
"the substance and essence"--the primary nature of things, on which all
their properties depend. The _material_ cause is "the matter or subject"
through which the primary nature manifests itself. Unfortunately the
term "material" misleads the modern thinker. He is in danger of
supposing the _hyle_ of Aristotle to be something sensible and physical,
whereas it is an intellectual principle whose inherence is implied in
any physical thing. It is something distinct from _body_, and has none
of those properties we are now accustomed to ascribe to matter. Body,
corporeity, is the result of the union of "hyle" and "form." Stobaeus
thus expounds the doctrine of Aristotle: Form alone, separate from
matter (yle) is _incorporeal_; so matter alone, separated from form, is
not _body_. But there is need of the joint concurrence of both
these--matter and form--to make the substance of body. Every individual
substance is thus a totality of matter and form--a sinolon.

The Stoics taught that God is _oneliness_ (Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of
the Philosophers," bk. vii. ch. lxviii.); that he is _eternal_ and
_immortal_ (bk. vii. ch. lxxii.); he could not, th