Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

i ORIGINS OF STOICISM xxi
moralised to signify the aberrations of the mind callous
to the promptings of the Universal Reason. The human
speech or thought which Heraclitus pronounced common
to all is magnified into the directive Reason immanent
in all things, and the material oppositions on which
Heraclitus loved to dwell become a figure of the ultimate
opposition, which subordinates sense, impulse, and all
other powers of man to the prevailing mastery of
Reason. The charge of 'misunderstanding familiar
things '
which Heraclitus levels against his contempor-
aries is moralised into man's estrangement from the
compelling dictates of Nature, and his persistent variance
with the besetting Reason that directs the universe.
In the same spirit Heraclitus' treatment of sleep as
the abeyance of all active consciousness is turned l
into a declaration and example of man's unconscious
co-operation with the Order of the world, even when
he least designs or actively promotes it.
In studying the early stages of Greek philosophy, the
violent oscillations of opinion remind us vividly how free
the field was for fearless speculation, how unhampered
by settled presuppositions, and how small as yet the
body of ascertained fact, which acted as pendulum to
steady the eccentricities of thought. While at Miletus
and then at Ephesus philosophy, following the clues of
physical hypothesis, was passing from a mechanical to a
dynamical conception of the world, and gradually shaping
the conviction that the force behind phenomena was
single in kind and uniform in action,
in the West the
problem of Being was assailed from a very different side
1 iv. 46 ; vi. 42.