Note 15 — Chapter VI · THE STUDY OF NATURE. FUNDAMENTAL POSITIONS.

(δ) Wide extension of material. Moreover, these materials produce the phenomena of life. Hence, not content with calling them bodies, the Stoics actually went so far as to call them living beings. It seems, however, strange to hear such things as day and night, and parts of the day and parts of the night, months and years, even days of the month and seasons of the year, called bodies;15 but by these singularly unhappy expressions Chrysippus appears to have meant little more than that the realities corresponding to these names depend on certain material conditions: by summer is meant a certain state of the air when highly heated by the sun; by month the moon for a certain definite period during which it gives light to the earth.16 From all these examples one thing is clear, how impossible the Stoics found it to assign reality to what is not material.