Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xxii INTRODUCTION SECT.
by thinkers of the Eleatic School. Xenophanes, Par-
menides, and Zeno, of Elea, with growing insistence
upon dialectic, attacked the problem from the side of
thought and logical predication, and sought to determine
the nature of the physical universe from the
'It is '
implications contained in the simple predicates
and *
It is not.' The idea of empty space a some-
thing which is nothing appeared to involve a contradiction
in terms, an attempt to think what is unthink-
able, an assertion that ' What is, is not '
;
and the denial
of void led logically on to the denial of motion and of
any possible plurality of being. It is needless here to
criticise the method of procedure ; for Stoicism does
not stake its case on pure dialectic, in adopting the
Eleatic inference, and affirming the universe, physical
as well as conceptual, to be a single Being, without
beginning and without end, self-existent and self-limited,
homogeneous and unchangeable in quality
A rounded sphere, poised in rotating rest. 1
In terms of physics the resultant universe must be
a One, a plenum, finite, continuous, indivisible, equally
extended and evenly poised in all directions a perfect
sphere.
For its logic of Being Stoicism reverted to the
Eleatics, as for its physics to Heraclitus ;
but the two
demanded reconciliation. On the showing of Heraclitus
true Being realised itself in the world of Becoming, in
the ordered succession of phenomena ; but though the
doctrine of Becoming might interpret
1 viii. 41 ; xii. 3. Cf. xi. 12.
the transience of