Note 47 — Chapter VI · THE STUDY OF NATURE. FUNDAMENTAL POSITIONS.

(c) Difficulties connected with the theory of necessity. (α) Statement of several difficulties. The Stoics were thus involved in a difficulty which besets every theory of necessity—the difficulty of doing justice to the claims of morality, and of vindicating the existence of moral responsibility. This difficulty became for them all the more pressing the higher those claims were advanced, and the more severely they judged the great majority of their fellow-men.47 To overcome it, Chrysippus appears to have made most energetic efforts.48 The existence of chance he could not allow, it being his aim to establish that what seems to be accidental has always some hidden cause.49 Nor would he allow that everything is necessary, since that can only be called necessary which depends on no external conditions, and is therefore always true;50 in other words, what is eternal and unchangeable, not that which comes to pass in time, however inevitable it may be.51 And, by a similar process of reasoning, he still tried to rescue the idea of the Possible, little as that idea accords with the Stoic system.52