he correlation of
which lay the kernel of the Stoic ethical system. The first of these
thoughts is this: the whole universe, in all its forms and
manifestations, shows unmistakably the work of Reason, of Mind; without
mind, reason, _spiritus_, as Cicero calls it,[777] the universe could
not exist. I need not go here into the origin and history of this
thought; what is important for us is to make clear the theological
consequences of it. Obviously it was natural that the Stoic should be
led on to the conviction that this universe endowed with Reason--with a
Reason far transcending all human capacity--must itself be God. The
Stoic arguments in support of this further step are indeed lame, as they
inevitably must be; they are well set forth at the beginning of Book ii.
of Cicero's work _de Natura Deorum_ (based upon one by Posidonius, the
successor and disciple of Panaetius), where they seem to us rather cold
and formal. That step is indeed incapable of being made convincing by
any syllogism; it is only when we try to think with the minds of those
old thinkers, living in a world of unmeaning worship, that we begin to
realise the nobility of a conviction which they tried in vain to reduce
to a syllogism. _Sapiens a principio mundus, et deus habendus est_;[778]
these words, which sound like an article of a creed, suffice for us
without the laborious arguments of Cleanthes and Chrysippus which we may
read in the fifth and sixth chapters of Cicero's book. Cicero has added
to these a characteristic illustration from city life, which I may quote
as more useful for us. "If a man enters a house or a gymnasium or a
forum, and sees reason, method, and discipline reigning there, he cannot
suppose that these came about without a cause, but perceives that there
is someone there who rules and is obeyed: how much more, when he
contemplates the motions and revolutions to be seen in the universe
(_e.g._, in the heavenly bodies), must he conclude that they are all
governed by a conscious Mind!" And this Mind can be nothing else but
God.

This sounds like the Deism of the eighteenth century, and might be
described as "natural religion"; but the Stoics took yet another step,
and developed their thought into Pantheism. The idea of a personal
Deity, distinct from the universe and its Creator, was obnoxious to
them; it would have committed them to a dualism of Mind and Matter
which, from the very outset of their history, they emphatically
repud