Note 16 — Chapter XIV · THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE AND ITS HISTORICAL POSITION.

(4) Connection with Plato. The speculative portions of Plato’s teaching could offer no great attractions to practical men and materialists like the Stoics, either in their original form or in the form which they assumed in the older Academy under Pythagorean influence. On the other hand, such points in Platonism as the Socratic habit of making knowledge the foundation of virtue, the comparative depreciation of external goods, the disparagement of all that is sensual, the elevation and the purity of moral idealism, and, in the older Academy, the demand for life according to nature, the doctrine of the self-sufficingness of virtue, and the growing tendency to confine philosophy to practical issues—all these were questions for a Stoic full of interest. Unfounded as the notion of the later Eclectics is,16 that the Stoic and Academician systems of morality were altogether the same, the Stoics, nevertheless, appear to have received suggestions from the Academy which they carried out in a more determined spirit. Thus the theory of living according to nature belongs originally to the Academy, although the Stoics adopted it with a peculiar and somewhat different meaning. Besides influencing the moral doctrines of the Stoics, the attitude assumed by the older Academy towards positive religion may also have had some influence on their orthodoxy; their most prominent representative, Cleanthes, is in his whole philosophic character the counterpart of Xenocrates. Although later in its origin than Stoicism, the new Academy was not without important influence on that system, through the person of Chrysippus, but this influence was at first only of an indirect kind, inasmuch as it obliged the Stoics by its logical contradiction to look about for a more logical basis for their system, and therewith to attempt a more systematic expansion of their teaching.17 Somewhat similar is the effect of Epicureanism, which by its strong opposition in the field of ethics imparted decision and accuracy to the Stoic doctrine, and thus indirectly helped to form it.