ABSTRACT
The ancestry of J. J. Rousseau’s ideas on man and man’s relation to his surroundings can be readily traced in large measure to the Stoics and, in an especial manner, to Seneca, while his ideal of political organization goes clearly back to the ancient conception of the polis. The two main-streams of Graeco-Roman speculation to exercise a lasting influence on European thought are the Aristotelian and the Stoic, and the great preoccupation of these schools lay with the conception of ‘nature’. All Aristotelian and Stoic thought centres around the principle of order. The universe is thought of in terms of a rational, ordered whole. The totality is viewed as a regulated unity, governed by deeply-laid, unerring laws. Reality, according to the Stoics, is pervaded by the divine principle of reason which expressed itself progressively in successive stages or types of existence, namely: in the inanimate, the brute and the human.
