The Crucible of Modern Thought Author:William Walker Atkinson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI STOICS, EPICUREANS, AND NEO-PLATONISTS The three great streams of thought flowing from the fount of ancient Greece and now irrigating the fertil... more »e mental fields of the twentieth century, are those to which we apply the terms, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Neo-Platonism, respectively. Let us give to each of these a few moments' consideration. STOICISM The great school of the Stoics was founded at Athens, by Zeno, of Cyprus, who lived about 340-265 B. C. The Stoic philosophy was not original, but was quite eclectic in nature, many sources having been drawn upon by it, and additions made from time to time. Starting with the fundamental conception of Heraclitus—the idea of the Universal Spirit of Fire, ever changing and with mind as its essence- it absorbed much from Plato through Aristotle, adding much of the philosophy of the latter at the same time. The Stoic ideas changed from time to time, in minor particulars, but the general and fundamental conceptions remained much the same from first to last. The Stoics were decidedly pantheistic. As Professor Tufts says: '' The Stoics . . . developed the primitive animistic theory of the Cosmos in such a way as to make their conception capable of being characterized at once as pantheism and as materialism. This was effected through the conception of the Pneuma, which was, on the one hand, the all pervading and animating spirit or life of the universe, and, on the other, was still a material substance, a finer air or fiery breath. In this Pneuma each individual shares. Accordingly, to follow human nature means not only to follow human nature's highest principle of reason, but to conform to the all- pervading and controlling principle of the world, to the divine Law or Logos which characterizes the Pneuma in its rational...« less