In order to appreciate Seneca’s treatment of his subject we must understand something of his philosophical tenets. He was in the main a Stoic, but with such a strong tendency toward independence that he may be considered an Eclectic. The Stoics, whether or not they originated, at any rate recognised and adopted the threefold division of philosophy--Physics, Ethics, Logic[14]--which was originated among the Greeks and handed down by them to the Romans, who were in this department their pupils. Seneca is typical of the Stoics in regarding Ethics as of supreme importance. On Logic he did not apparently set any great store, though he must have been a diligent student of the cognate branch, Rhetoric. Physics, as we have seen, did not claim much attention from him in early life; only as he approached the mature age of threescore did his study of it become more detailed and systematic. No clear line of demarcation existed in his mind, or for the matter of that in his age, between philosophy and science. Yet there is considerable internal evidence in the _Q.N._ that his pursuit of such studies was in part an outcome of the true scientific spirit, and that he possessed in no ordinary degree the scientific imagination. Still, when all due allowance is made for this, it remains true that Seneca was moralist first and physicist or scientist afterwards. Physics led to theology,[15] and had thus a direct bearing on man’s destiny and fate. Had there been no Ethics, whose interests were involved in a knowledge of the universe, its parts, its function, and its author, the impelling motive for the study of Physics would have been removed. Possibly when his political career was closed by the death of Burrus in 63, Seneca might in any case have devoted some of his leisure to a subject which offered such opportunities of exalted contemplation. But it was his ethical aims that added the chief zest to the pursuit.[16] As the various departments of knowledge had not assumed definite divergent forms, there was nothing incongruous to his mind in the mixture, or as he might have regarded it, the union, of what to us seem so different from one another as Physics and Ethics. The facts of nature had, in his view, to be brought into connection with the lessons that may be derived from them. In so many words he tells us (102) that every study must have a moral attached to it, or to put it otherwise, that physical phenomena must be made the occasion for driving home some general truth, establishing some ethical position, clinching an argument, reprobating a vice. The conclusion of each Book of the _Q.N._ contains the practical application of the lessons to be derived from its subject: there are not infrequent digressions, too, for the same or a cognate purpose. The author’s moral zeal sometimes ran off with him, and he felt constrained to break off for the time his discussion of scientific truths and to assume the rôle of the moralist and reformer.[17]