Note 65 — Chapter VI · THE STUDY OF NATURE. FUNDAMENTAL POSITIONS.

Upon closer examination, even the difference between the materialistic and idealistic description of God vanishes. God, according to Stoic principles, can only be invested with reality when He has a material form. Hence, when He is called the Soul, the Mind, or the Reason of the world, this language does not exclude, but rather presupposes, that these conceptions have bodies; and such bodies the Stoics thought to discern in that heated fluid which they at one time call the all-penetrating Breath, at another Ether, or primary Fire.65 Each of these two determinations appeared to them indispensable,66 and both became identical by assuming, as the Stoics did, that the infinite character of the divine Reason depends on the purity and lightness of the fiery material which composes it.67 Seneca is therefore only following out the principles of his School when he pronounces it indifferent whether God is regarded as Destiny or as an all-pervading Breath.68 Those who charge the Stoics with inconsistency for calling God at one time Reason, at another Soul of the universe, at another Destiny, at another Fire, Ether, or even the Universe,69 forget that they are attaching to these terms a meaning entirely different from that in which they were used by them.70