The Stoics were thus involved in a difficulty which besets every theory of necessity—the difficulty of doing justice to the claims of morality, and of vindicating the existence of moral responsibility. This difficulty became for them all the more pressing the higher those claims were advanced, and the more severely they judged the great majority of their fellow-men. [381] To overcome it, Chrysippus appears to have made most energetic efforts. [382] The existence of chance he could not allow, it being his aim to establish that what seems to be accidental has always some hidden cause. [383] Nor would he allow that everything is necessary, since that can only be called necessary which depends on no external conditions, and is therefore always true; [384] in other words, what is eternal and unchangeable, not that which comes to pass in time, however inevitable it may be. [385] And, by a similar process of reasoning, he still tried to rescue the idea of the Possible, little as that idea accords with the Stoic system. [386] [(β) Moral responsibility vindicated.] In reference to human actions, the Stoics did not allow the freedom of the will, in the proper sense of the term; [387] but were of opinion that absence of freedom does not prejudice the character of the will as a deciding power. For is not one and the same all-determining power everywhere active, working in each particular being according to the law of its nature, in one way in organic beings, in another in inorganic beings, differently again in animals and plants, in rational and irrational creatures? [388] And albeit every action may be brought about by the co-operation of causes depending on the nature of things and the character of the agent, is it not still free, the resultant of our own impulses and decision? [389] Involuntary it would only be were it produced by external causes alone, without any co-operation, on the part of our wills, with external causes. [390] Moral responsibility, according to the Stoics, depends only on freedom of the will. What emanates from my will is my action, no matter whether it be possible for me to act differently or not. [391] Praise and blame, rewards and punishment, express the judgment of society relative to the character of certain persons or actions. [392] Whether they could have been different, or not, is irrelevant. Otherwise virtue and vice must be set down as things not in our power, for which, consequently, we are not responsible, seeing that when a man is once virtuous or vicious, he cannot be otherwise; [393] and the highest perfection, that of the Gods, is absolutely unchangeable. [394] Chrysippus [395] even endeavoured to show, not only that his whole theory of destiny was in harmony with the claims of morality and moral responsibility, but that it presupposed their existence. The arrangement of the universe, he argued, involves law, and law involves the distinction between what is