Note 10 — Chapter IV · AUTHORITIES FOR THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY: ITS PROBLEM AND DIVISIONS.

(3) Position towards logic and natural science. (a) Aristo’s views. These remarks prove the need for the Stoics of that kind of scientific knowledge which has to do with life, the morals and the actions of mankind, in short, of Ethics. Whether further scientific knowledge is necessary, was a question on which the earliest adherents of the Stoic teaching expressed different opinions. Zeno’s pupil, Aristo of Chios, held that the sole business of man is to pursue virtue,10 and that the sole use of language is to purify the soul.11 This purifying process, however, is neither to be found in logical subtleties nor in natural science. Logic, as doing more harm than good, he compared to a spider’s web, which is as useless as it is curious;12 or else to the mud on a road.13 Those who studied it he likened to people eating lobsters, who take a great deal of trouble for the sake of a little bit of meat enveloped in much shell.14 Convinced, too, that the wise man is free from every deceptive infatuation,15 and that doubt, for the purpose of refuting which logic has been invented, can be more easily overcome by a healthy tone of mind16 than by argument, he felt no particular necessity for logic. Nay, more, he considered that excessive subtlety transforms the healthy action of philosophy into an unhealthy one.17 Just as little was Aristo disposed to favour the so-called encyclical knowledge: those who devote themselves to this knowledge instead of to philosophy he compared to the suitors of Penelope, who won the maids but not the mistress.18 Natural science would probably have received a more favourable treatment at the hands of Aristo, had he not shared the opinion of Socrates, that it is a branch of knowledge which transcends the capacity of the human mind;19 and having once embraced this notion, he was inclined to pronounce all physical enquiries useless. His attitude towards other sciences has therefore been generally expressed by saying that he excluded from philosophy both logic and natural science, on the ground that both are useless; the former being irrelevant, and the latter transcending our powers.20 Even ethics was limited by Aristo to most fundamental notions—to enquiries into good and evil, virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. The special application of these notions to the moral problems suggested by particular relations in life, he declared to be useless and futile; proper for nursemaids and trainers of young children, but not becoming for philosophers;21 wherever there is a proper knowledge and a right disposition, such particular applications will come of themselves without teaching; but when these are wanting, all exhortations are useless.22