The central problem of Greek ethics was not to determine the moral laws, but rather to find the chief good and the mode of conduct which would secure it. It is the doctrine of goods, rather than the doctrine of duties, which gave the key-note to the whole moral philosophy of the Greeks. With the Stoics, as with their contemporaries and opponents, the Epicureans, and with Aristotle before them, the aim is to determine the highest good of life. The Epicureans pronounced pleasure the highest good; the Stoics virtue, and virtue they explained as conduct according to the laws of nature. These laws of nature are not conceived so much as imperatives of the divine will which ought to be obeyed because thus commanded, but rather as ordinances of the divine reason, compliance with which can alone secure weal to rational beings.
The good in every system of thought must be based on the general arrangement of the world, and as the Stoics understand the world to be a cosmos governed by Reason, they consequently found the good of the individual in submitting himself to the laws of this universal Reason. Obedience is not imposed upon man by authority, but men are bound by their very desire for the highest good to obey the laws of their own rational nature, which are at the same time the laws of the rational universe. The grand principle of human life, then, is to live according to nature. But by nature the Stoics meant almost the opposite of what is ordinarily meant by that term. To follow nature with them is not to give loose rein to one's native passions and emotions; it is to conform the individual to the universal and rational. Emotions and passions they regarded as a product of the irrational elements in our make-up, and as such to be negated by the wise man. Hence the modern usage of the term 'stoical.' This failure to provide for the legitimate exercise of the emotions is the pre-eminent defect in the Stoic theory of morals. An adequate ethics will find scope for all of man's faculties and powers, for the symmetrical development of all sides of his nature.
Closely connected with the modern concept of moral law is the idea of duty. Though quite in harmony with their general
