Note 1 — Chapter I

According to the view of James Harris, in a long and valuable note communicated to Upton, the “master-argument” was so called from the supreme importance of the issues with which it dealt. On these issues different leaders of the Stoics took different sides, Diodorus holding both future and past things to be necessary, Cleanthes both contingent, and Chrysippus past things to be necessary and future contingent. Any two of the three propositions mentioned in the text exclude the third. For modern philosophy the distinction between the possible and the certain in the phenomenal world has, of course, no real existence; the possible being simply that of which we do not know whether it will come to pass or not.