Note 18 — Chapter XIV · THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY AS A WHOLE AND ITS HISTORICAL POSITION.

Haunted by this longing for virtue, Zeno must have felt attracted by a system of philosophy which had at an earlier period followed a similar course with marked success, viz. the system of the Cynics, and what he doubtless identified therewith, the old Socratic teaching.18 Anxious to find a positive meaning and scientific basis for virtue, he strove to appropriate from every system whatever agreed with the bent of his own mind. By using all the labours of his predecessors, and keeping his eye steadily fixed upon the practical end of philosophy, he succeeded in forming a new and more comprehensive system, which was afterwards completed by Chrysippus. In point of form this system was most indebted to the Peripatetic philosophy; in point of matter, next to its debt to the Cynics, which has been already mentioned, its chief obligation was to Heraclitus. But the moral theory of the Stoics was as little identical with that of the Cynics, as the natural science of the Stoics was with that of Heraclitus. If the divergence was, in the first instance, due to the influence of the Stoic principles, still the influence of the Peripatetic teaching is unmistakeable in the natural and speculative science of the Stoics, and the influence of the Academy in their moral science. Stoicism does not, therefore, appear simply as a continuation of Cynicism, nor yet as an isolated innovation, but, like every other form of thought which marks an epoch, it worked up into itself all previous materials, and produced from their combination a new result. In this process of assimilation much that was beautiful and full of meaning was omitted; everything was absorbed that could be of use in the new career on which the Greek mind was about to enter.