Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

ii 2 BIRTH OF STOICISM xliii
of the term nature had (perhaps undesignedly) tended to
narrow the main principle and throw the stress upon a
single side, instead of upon the whole, of individuality.
The antecedents and associations of the term were (it
must be remembered) inalienably material ; they con-
cerned the growth and make and substance of the
material world, and, as applied to man, tended to con-
fine reference to the like processes, material and animal,
observed in him. Will '
in agreement with nature '
tended
to mean will exercised upon the animal activities ; and
in suppressing the limitation, Zeno removed a misleading
emphasis. He, in effect, recalled attention to those
elements in man which stood in less direct relation with
the material world. Agreement with one sort and side of
man's natural activities could not satisfy the demand for
inward self-conformity, which was set up as the moral
ideal. For unity of act and disposition, it was essential
to co-ordinate understanding and reflection with sense
and impulse and perception, and to integrate rightly-
ordered and operative reason with each exercise of
virtuous will. This did not involve a reconstruction
of the main system.
The '
agreement with nature,' the
validity of sense-perception, the authority
of sensuous
impulse, the supremacy of will, the identification of
happiness with virtue and its corollary
imperturbability and things indifferent,
doctrines of
all remain un-
touched; but notwithstanding this, the reinclusion of
reason, and of some, at least, of the reactions between
man and man, as well as those between man and the
material world, in the expression of individuality,
enlarged to that extent the area and contents of self-