The Stoic Logos Spermatikos

Heraclitus was the first Greek philosopher to use the term “logos” to describe the principle of order and knowledge. The Greek philosophers who followed him have used the term in their own ways. For the Sophists, “logos” was the term for discourse. Aristotle has used “logos” for discourse, but he called it “reasoned discourse” or persuasion. In the texts of the Stoics, “logos” acquired a metaphysical overtone—they wrote about the logos spermatikos, which were the seed logos that pervaded all inanimate and animate matter. In human beings, the logos spermatikos is the element of the divine principle which sees everything, not in parts, as human senses and human reason do, but as a whole of the truth and reality. The Ancient Hindu philosophers of the Vedic age used the concept of Supreme Brahman (which is the prime author of the universe) to describe a cosmic phenomena similar to the Stoic logos spermatikos.