Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xvi INTRODUCTION SECT.
the various deposits of Greek thought which find a
place in his philosophy,
of dexterous and surprising intricacy.
and which form a combination
Early in the sixth century B.C., when Greek thought
thrilled into sudden interest in the causes and origin of
things, the first question
to rouse and baffle intellectual
curiosity was, naturally enough, the make and nature of
the external world. What was it made of? How did
it come into being ? and continue to exist ? What was
its
'
nature '
? These were the questions which first
troubled the waters of Western thought, and aroused
the speculative curiosity and imagination of the Ionian
philosophers. Behind the countless variety of things lay
an irresistible suggestion of order and of unity, which,
amid the infinite diversity of phenomena, seemed to
connect the phases of matter, and to shape the round of
being, in alternations of succession and recurrence, within
the limits of some fixed mould, or subject to the opera-
tions of some unifying power such as inhabits and directs
the individual organism. What was the fixed something
that underlay the phases of transformation ? The
earliest guess attributed the unity to oneness of material,
and looked for some elemental stuff that might be
regarded
as the common cause and basis of existent
things. The study of phenomena showed everywhere
the passage from form to form, the processes of birth,
change, decay, and reconstruction, nothing anywhere
coming out of nothing, or passing from being back into
nothingness. What was the fixed One among the
moving Many? The great visible unities, earth, sea,
and sky the solid, the fluid, and the gaseous were