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Updated: May 13, 2025
Now for Nature; as by the ambiguity of this name, the school of Aristotle hath both commended many errors unto us, and sought also thereby to obscure the glory of the high moderator of all things, shining in the creation, and in the governing of the world: so if the best definition be taken out of the second of Aristotle's "Physics," or "primo de Coelo," or out of the fifth of his "Metaphysics"; I say that the best is but nominal, and serving only to difference the beginning of natural motion from artificial: which yet the Academics open better, when they call it "a seminary strength, infused into matter by the soul of the world": who give the first place to Providence, the second to Fate, and but the third to Nature.
Stoics and Epicureans, far more important for the first century than Academics, were materialists; but that does not mean that they did not believe in the existence of a human soul or spirit. Spirit was for them merely the most attenuated form of matter.
The public outcry against executive pay and compensation followed disclosures of insider trading, double dealing, and outright fraud. But even honest and productive entrepreneurs often earn more money in one year than Albert Einstein did in his entire life. This strikes many especially academics as unfair.
"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days! The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is only the tool.
We know very little of those Sceptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom there has been so much talk, except at second-hand, through the Romans, from whom Stoicism in after ages received a new and not ignoble life.
Friedrich got to Wesel on the 29th; found Maupertuis waiting there, according to appointment: an elaborately polite, somewhat sublime scientific gentleman; ready to "engraft on the Berlin crab-tree," and produce real apples and Academics there, so soon as the King, the proprietor, may have leisure for such a thing. Algarotti has already the honor of some acquaintance with Maupertuis.
This difference of sentiment between the magistrate and the pleader is strikingly illustrated in the opening of his treatise de Legibus; where, after deriving the principles of law from the nature of things, he is obliged to beg quarter of the Academics, whose reasonings he feels could at once destroy the foundation on which his argument rested.
'Do you not think, then, that as the greater contains the less, and the archetype of the genus that of the species, we should have been wiser if we had speculated a little more on the archetype of man as man, before we meddled with a part of that archetype, the archetype of the philosopher?.... Certainly it would have been the easier course, for there are more men than philosophers, Hypatia; and every man is a real man, and a fair subject for examination, while every philosopher is not a real philosopher our friends the Academics, for instance, and even a Neo-Platonist or two whom we know?
It was hard, said the Academics, that a grave and learned man, sent by a large body of grave and learned men to the Great Council of the nation, should be thought less fit to sit in that Council than a boozing clown who had scarcely literature enough to entitle him to the benefit of clergy.
Because, by Zeus, said Sospis, I see the children playing odd and even with jackstones and the Academics with words. For such tempers as these differ in no way from those who ask whether they hold clutched in their hands odd or even.
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