St. George William Joseph Stock

“ The only evil that can never befall him is vice, because that would be a contradiction in terms. Unless therefore Socrates was uttering idle words on the most solemn occasion of his life, he must be taken to have meant that there is no evil but vice, which implies that there is no good but virtue. Thus we are landed at once in the heart of the Stoic morality. To the question why, if there be a providence, so many evils happen to good men, Seneca unflinchingly replies: "No evil can happen to a good man, contraries do not mix." ”

“ We cannot be justified in inferring that platinum will be melted by heat, except where we have equal reason for asserting the same thing of copper or any other metal. In fact we are justified in drawing an individual inference only when we can lay down the universal proposition, 'Every metal can be melted by heat.' But the moment this universal proposition is stated, the truth of the proposition in the individual instance flows from it by way of deductive inference. Take away the universal, and we have no logical warrant for arguing from one individual case to another. ”

“ But before such an amalgam of paganism and Christianity could be propounded, it is evident that Christianity must have been for some little time before the world, and that the system cannot possibly be traced back to Simon Magus. Is it not this early struggle between Jewish and Samaritan universalism, involving as it did a struggle of religion against magic, that is really symbolized under the wild traditions of the contest between Peter and Simon? ”

“ We simply wish to distinguish that being, in thought and language, from other beings of the same kind. Roughly speaking, therefore, proper names are devoid of meaning or intension. But no name can be entirely devoid of meaning. For, even setting aside the fact, which is not universally true, that proper names indicate the sex of the owner, the mere act of giving a name to a thing implies at least that the thing exists, whether in fact or thought; it implies what we may call 'thinghood': so that every term must carry with it some small amount of intension. ”

“ In short, it was the business of the man of virtue to know and to do what ought to be done, for what ought to be done implied wisdom in choice, courage in endurance, justice in assignment and temperance in abiding by ones conviction. One virtue never acted by itself, but always on the advice of a committee. The obverse to this paradox—He who has one vice has all vices—was a conclusion which the Stoics did not shrink from drawing. One might lose part of one's Corinthian ware and still retain the rest, but to lose one virtue—if virtue could be lost—would be to lose all along with it. ”

“ Strictly we ought to speak of conceiving, judging and inferring on the one hand, and, on the other, of the concept, the judgement and the inference.
The direct object of logic is the study of the products rather than of the processes of thought. But, at the same time, in studying the products we are studying the processes in the only way in which it is possible to do so. For the human mind cannot be both actor and spectator at once; we must wait until a thought is formed in our minds before we can examine it. ”

“ The universe was pervaded by intelligence as man's body is pervaded by his soul. But as the human soul though everywhere present in the body is not present everywhere in the same degree, so it was with the world-soul. The human soul presents itself not only as intellect, but also in the lower manifestations of sense, growth, and cohesion. It is the soul which is the cause of the plant life, which displays itself more particularly in the nails and hair; it is the soul also which causes cohesion among the parts of the solid substances such as bones and sinews, that make up our frame. ”

“ There is nothing more distinctive of Socrates than the doctrine that virtue is knowledge. Here too the Stoics followed him, ignoring all that Aristotle had done in showing the part played by the emotions and the will in virtue. Reason was with them a principle of action; with Aristotle it was a principle that guided action, but the motive power had to come from elsewhere. Socrates must even be held responsible for the Stoic paradox of the madness of all ordinary folk. ”

“ The answer of course depends upon whether they are names of substances or names of attributes. But attributives, it must be remembered, are never directly names of anything, in the way that subject-terms are; they are only names of things in virtue of being predicated of them. Whether an attributive is abstract or concrete, depends on the nature of the subject of which it is asserted or denied. When we say 'This man is noble,' the term 'noble' is concrete, as being the name of a substance: but when we say 'This act is noble,' the term 'noble' is abstract, as being the name of an attribute. ”

“ What we call a division on a single basis is in reality the compressed result of a scheme of division and subdivision by dichotomy, in which a fresh principle has been introduced at every step. Thus when we divide men, on the basis of colour, into white, black, brown, red and yellow, we may be held to have first divided men into white and not-white, and then to have subdivided the men that are not-white into black and not-black, and so on. ”

“ The universe was the only thing which was perfect in itself, the one thing which was an end in itself. All other things were perfect indeed as parts, when considered with reference to the whole, but were none of them ends in themselves, unless man could be deemed so who was born to contemplate the universe and imitate its perfections. Thus, then, did the Stoics envisage the universe on its physical side—as one, finite, fixed in space, but revolving round its own centre, earth, beautiful beyond all things, and perfect as a whole. ”

“ It is by the treatment of the Fallacies that logic chiefly vindicates its claim to be considered a practical rather than a speculative science. To explain and give a name to fallacies is like setting up so many sign-posts on the various turns which it is possible to take off the road of truth. ”

“ Virtue for an eternity was no more virtue, and therefore no more good, than virtue for a moment. Even so one circle was no more round than another, whatever you might choose to make its diameter, nor would it detract from the perfection of a circle if it were to be obliterated immediately in the same dust in which it had been drawn.
To say that the good of men lay in virtue was another way of saying that it lay in reason, since virtue was the perfection of reason. ”

“ So a proposition expressed in precisely the same form 'Some A is B' may be either strictly particular, if some be taken to exclude all, or indefinite, if the word 'some' does not exclude the possibility of the statement being true of all. It is evident that the term 'particular' has become distorted from its original meaning. It would naturally lead us to infer that a statement is limited to part of the subject, whereas, by its being opposed to universal, in the sense in which that term has been defined, it can only mean that we have nothing to show us whether part or the whole is spoken of. ”

“ He figured to himself the soul as receiving a modification from every external object which acts upon it just as the air receives countless strokes when many people are speaking at once. Further, he declared that in receiving an impression the soul was purely passive and that the phantasy revealed not only its own existence, but that also of its cause, just as light displays itself and the things that are in it. Thus, when through sight we receive an impression of white, an affection takes place in the soul, in virtue whereof we are able to say that there exists a white object affecting us. ”

“ Thus, given an affirmative proposition 'Whales are mammals,' if we can affirm anything universally of the predicate 'mammals,' as, for instance, that 'All mammals are warm-blooded,' we shall be able to affirm the same of the subject 'whales'; and, if we can deny anything universally of the predicate, as that 'No mammals are oviparous,' we shall be able to deny the same of the subject. ”

“ FOREWORD If you strip Stoicism of its paradoxes and its wilful misuse of language, what is left is simply the moral philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, dashed with the physics of Heraclitus. Stoicism was not so much a new doctrine as the form under which the old Greek philosophy finally presented itself to the world at large. ”

“ Every proposition is a sentence, but every sentence is not a proposition.
§ 174. The field of logic is far from being conterminous with that of language. Language is the mirror of man's whole nature, whereas logic deals with language only so far as it gives clothing to the products of thought in the narrow sense which we have assigned to that term. Language has materials of every sort lying strewn about, among which the logician has to seek for his proper implements. ”

“ In the widest sense, Nature was another name for Providence, or the principle which held the universe together, but, as the term is now being employed, it stood for that degree of existence which is above cohesion and below soul. ”

“ When we say, 'All men are rational animals,' we have a true general proposition, because the predicate applies to the subject distributively, and not collectively. What we mean is that 'rational animal' may be affirmed of every individual in the class, man. But when we say 'All men are all rational animals,' the predicate no longer applies to the subject distributively, but only collectively. For it is obvious that 'all rational animals' cannot be affirmed of every individual in the class, man. What the proposition means is that the class, man, is co-extensive with the class, rational animal. ”

“ As a member of existing society the sage would marry and beget children, both for his own sake and for that of his country, on behalf of which, if it were good, he would be ready to suffer and die. Still he would look forward to a better time when, in Zeno's as in Plato's republic, the wise would have women and children in common, when the elders would love all the rising generation equally with parental fondness, and when marital jealousy would be no more. ”

“ For if an attribute were found to belong invariably to all the members of a class, we should suspect that there was some causal connection between it and the attributes which constitute the definition, that is, we should suspect the attribute in question to be essential and not accidental. Nevertheless the term 'inseparable accident' may be retained as a cloak for our ignorance, whenever it is found that an attribute does, as a matter of fact, belong to all the members of a class, without there being any apparent reason why it should do so. ”