"Everything that the senses report to us is

material, and only material things can cause or receive action.

Qualities as well as quantities, virtues as well as passions, soul as

well as body, God as well as the stars, are material forms or

processes, differing in degrees of fineness, but essentially

one. On the other hand all matter is dynamic, full of

tensions and powers, perpetually engaged in diffusion or

concentration, and animated by an internal and eternal energy, heat,

or fire. The universe lives through innumerable cycles of expansion

and contraction, development and dissolution; periodically it is

consumed in a grand conflagration, and slowly it takes form again

then it passes through all its previous history, even in minutest

detail; for the chain of causes and effects is an unbreakable

circle, an endless repetition. All events and all acts of will are

determined; it is as impossible for anything to happen otherwise

than it does as it is for something to come out of nothing; any

break in the chain would disrupt the world."

Ancient Greece Hellenistic Kingdoms Stoicism