1. In the first place, _Nature is an all-pervading World-Being_. It is God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” It contains in itself all cosmic phenomena, and processes, past, present, and future. It is the World-ground and the World-mind, and yet it is all-in-all. It is the productive and formative power, the vitalizing principle. In general, it is the creative and guiding reason; in particular, it is Providence or divine government. It is the unswerving whole in which the single events of history take place. To the Stoics the cosmic Reason was so apparent in Nature that purpose appeared to them in everything. In their hands the great teleological conception of Aristotle’s immanent purposiveness sank to the petty purposiveness for human beings and for the gods. Yet it is no wonder that this conception of an all-pervasive deity became a religion to the Stoics and raised their moral code to the region of the sublime. The world is Fate so far as the minutest movements are determined. Nature is Providence so far as those determinations are full of purpose. Nature is in every part perfect and without blemish. 2. In the second place, _Nature is an all-compelling law_. Nature is an inviolable necessity, an inevitable destiny, that holds all phenomena in complete causal connection. Yet this destiny only proves the complete purpose of the whole. The Stoic seized upon the central principle of Democritus,――which the Epicureans had overlooked,――the supremacy of law. “The doctrine of Democritus passed over to the Epicureans only so far as it was atomism and mechanism; with regard to the deeper and more valuable principle of the universal reign of law in Nature, his legacy passed to the Stoics.”[35] There is no such thing as chance; everything is caused. In Epicureanism one finds the doctrine of necessity, but the necessity comes from the atoms themselves. In Stoicism the necessity resides in the living activity of the whole. A living activity! Herein the Stoic conception differs from the Democritan teaching. The necessity is a living necessity, the destiny a living destiny. 3. In the third place, _Nature is matter_. On the theoretical side Stoicism agrees with Epicureanism only at one point,――both were materialistic. The materialism of both these New Schools got a disproportionate prominence because it had to be defended against the attacks of the Academy and the Lyceum. The materialism of the Epicureans was a mere adoption of a theory; the materialism of the Stoics was only one aspect of its supplementary basis. Nevertheless, to the Stoic matter alone is real, because _it alone acts and is acted upon_. Everything is matter,――nature-objects, God and the soul, and even the qualities, forces, and relations between material bodies. The Stoics regarded the presence and interchange of the qualities of things as the appearance and intermingling of bodies in these things.