Respecting the process of nature we may further say this: Fire, Stobæus tells us (Eclog. phys. I. p. 312), is called by the Stoics an element in a pre-eminent sense, because from it, as the primary element, all else arises through a transformation, and in it, as in an ultimate, everything is fused and becomes dissolved. Thus Heraclitus and Stoicism rightly comprehended this process as a universal and eternal one. This has even been done by Cicero, though in a more superficial way; in this reflection he falsely sees the conflagration of the world in time and the end of the world, which is quite another matter. For in his work _De natura Deorum_ (II. 46) he makes a Stoic speak thus: “In the end (_ad extremum_) everything will be consumed by fire; for if all moisture becomes exhausted the earth can neither be nourished, nor can air return into existence. Thus nothing but fire remains, through whose reanimation and through God the world will be renewed and the same order will return.” This is spoken after the manner of the ordinary conception. But to the Stoics everything is merely a Becoming. However deficient this may be, God, as the fiery principle, is yet to them the whole activity of nature, and likewise the rational order of the same, and in this lies the perfect pantheism of the Stoic conception of nature. Not only do they call this ordering force God, but also nature, fate or necessity (εἱμαρμένην), likewise Jupiter, the moving force of matter, reason (νοῦν) and foresight (πρόνοιαν); to them all these are synonymous.[129] Because the rational brings forth all, the Stoics compare this impelling activity to a seed, and say: “The seed which sends forth something rational (λογικόν) is itself rational. The world sends forth the seeds of the rational and is thus in itself rational;” that is to say, rational both generally, in the whole, and in each particular existent form. “All beginning of movement in any nature and soul rises from a ruling principle, and all powers which are sent forth upon the individual parts of the whole proceed from the ruling power as from a source; so that each force that is in the part is also in the whole, because the force is distributed by the ruling power in it. The world embraces the seed-containing conceptions of the life which is in conformity with the conception,” _i.e._ all particular principles.[130] The Physics of the Stoics is thus Heraclitean, though the logical element is entirely at one with Aristotle; and we may regard it as being such. However, speaking generally, only those belonging to earlier times had a physical element in their philosophy: those coming later neglected Physics entirely and kept alone to Logic and to Ethics.