"The Author of the world's great plan The same result will draw From human life, however mau May keep or break his law."
The Divinity is dispersed, rather than divided, among manj' secondary gods — " ignobilis deorum turba" — but still retains the totality of its own essence. It is the same God always under many names : Zsrc iroXvwvo- fioi; in the [lymn of Cleanthes; "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord," in the tinkling superficiality of Pope. This is regarded as due to accommodation to the contempora- neous polytheism. Yet it is assuredly a natural devel- opment of the general scheme. The Divinity is in all things, and everything is divine; but it dwells with greater fulness and evidence in some of its incorpora- tions than in others. Where its presence is amplest its manifestation may be most fitly recognised. The stars have their indwelling and presiding deities, as with Plato and others of the older philosophers. As everything is necessitated, " the stars in their courses" are subject to law. And as all the concomitants of change are concurrently under the law, and are linked to each other by the bonds of the law, astrology (" con- scia fati sidera") and all forms of divination are worthy of credit. Such indications as they afford are compre- hended and interpreted either by natural intuition, through a larger participation in the universal reason and a dim sympathy with its pulsations, or by observa- tion of coincidences and acrpdred skill. It is almost the declaration of Nostradamus in respect to his own pretensions. The descent of the divine is not, how- ever, restricted to secondary gods and to their starry thrones. It attends the life of the whole in all its mem- bers and in all its motions, and it accompanies the prog- ress of the universal reason throughout all its infinite wanderings. Man is himself divine. His soul is a "vital spark of heavenly flame" — "particula coelestis aurai." It is a spherical flame proceeding from the fiery ethereal sphere. In every one dwells a genius, angel, or d;emon ; in every good man, a god, " Bonus vir sine tleo nemo est" (Seneca, Kp. xli, 2), With all these gradations, the unity of the Deity and the unity of the universe remain unimpaired. There is only one existence, the "causa causaruin, causa uidversalis, ani- ma mundi, mimdus" — heat, which was not merely "a mode of motion," but the cause, the spring, the sub- stance, of all motion and of all change (Cicero, Be Nut. Dtor. ii, t), -.'I). The soul and the life of man, two po-
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tencies united in one force, are themselves material. It is a " fiery particle :"
"Igneus est ollis vigor et ccelestis origo." It is an efflux of the divine ether, as its reason is the procedure of the universal reason. It goes through its career, accompanying and animating the other matter with which it is conjoined. \\'hen its native ardor is chilled by time or consumed by action or subdued by circumstances, its corporeal alloy becomes decomposed, and it is exhaled into the circumambient air. Its sub- sequent fortune was variously conceived by different teachers of the school. Some maintained its immor- tality; others denied it (Cicero, Tusc. J)isp. i, 31, 77). Some held that its absorption into the general body of the Divinity was immediate and universal. Others be- lieved that such immediate return to its source was limited to the souls of the perfect, and that other souls passed through an elevated purgatory and were " puri- fied so as by tire." Others, again, held that the spirits of the blessed dwelt in the stars, and surveyed from those lofty seats the scenes of their terrestrial experi- ences, awaiting the grand conflagration, when they, with all the worlds around them, should be reunited to the universal tire. Some asserted that only the souls of Stoic sages were swallowed up in the ocean of Divin- ity ; and that the rest rotted with their " tenements of clay" in "cold obstruction's apathy." Every possible variety of opinion was entertained. Seneca's views, as on most of the tenets of the creed, are largely eclectic and vacillating. They are modifications of the Stoic doctrine and are impregnated with Platonism. They are always rhetorical, and usually careless of philosoph- ical consistency.
Of course, under the reign of fate and of absolute law, the freedom of the will must be denied. A delu- sive freedom of the will was, however, imagined; and the will was supposed capable of self-determination by voluntary acquiescence in the necessity to which it was subjected. Freedom was entire submission to the law of nature and the compulsion of fate. Such, too, was the freedom of the Divinity : "semper paret, semel jus- sit." It was the same sort of freedom which is con- ceded to the will by Spinoza; but it sufficed as an ap- parent and precarious basis for the Stoic resolution. If there is no freedom of will or of action, and if every- thing proceeds from intrinsic necessity and is controlled by fate, evil can have no positive or real existence. Physical evil is, with Zeno, the incompleteness or im- perfection of parts, which is requisite to the perfection of the whole. Moral evil was admitted as a counterpart of good, and as a consequence of the inharmonious admixt- ure of constituents in humanitj-. But it was maintain- ed that there was no evil for the virtuous; that "all things work together for good to them that love (iod," and that the good and wise man is wliolly impeccable.