=192.= In including in their system the study of the physical universe the Stoics broke daringly with Socrates and his faithful followers the Cynics. These had joined with the ignorant and the prejudiced[1] in ridiculing those whose eyes were always turned up towards the sky, whilst they saw nothing of things that were nearer at hand and concerned them more closely. But it was not for nothing that the most highly civilised nations of antiquity, Egyptians, Chaldaeans, and Babylonians, had studied the starry heavens, mapped out the constellations, measured the paths of the wandering stars, predicted eclipses, reckoned with the tides, the seasons, and the winds; with the result that their successors defied the common opinion by declaring the earth to be a sphere, and to hold inhabitants whom they called Antipodes, because they walk with their feet turned up towards ours[2]. All this body of knowledge, called generically the knowledge of the sky (though it included the whole physical geography of the earth), had impressed and fascinated the Eastern world. It seemed that as the eyes were raised to the sky, so the mind of man was elevated and made ampler and nobler[3], leaving behind it the petty contentions and rivalries of common life; and further that true knowledge had surely been reached, when the positions of the heavenly bodies and the eclipses of sun and moon could be predicted so long before with unfailing accuracy. These feelings are now commonplaces of literature, and were fully shared by the Stoics. ‘Is not the sun,’ says Seneca, ‘worthy of our gaze, the moon of our regard? When the sky displays its fires at night, and countless stars flash forth, who is not absorbed in contemplation of them? They glide past in their company, concealing swift motion under the outward appearance of immobility. We comprehend the movements of a few of them, but the greater number are beyond our ken. Their dignity fills all our thoughts[4].’ In the golden age which preceded our iron civilisation ‘men lay at nights in the open fields, and watched the glorious spectacle of the heavens. It was their delight to note the stars that sank in one quarter and rose in another. The universe swept round them, performing its magnificent task in silence[5].’ ‘Their order never changes, spring and autumn, winter and summer succeed according to fixed laws[6].’ And in the same tone writes the Stoic poet: ‘unshaken the lights of heaven ever move onwards in their proper orbit[7].’ The emotion roused in the Stoic by the contemplation of the sky was thus identical with that expressed in Judaic poetry by the ‘Song of the Three Holy Children[8],’ and in more modern times by Addison’s famous hymn[9]. [Sidenote: The world-order.]