Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/374

 secondly that this reason informs man that his only true good and evil is right and wrong, and that he is able to secure this for himself; thirdly that right and wrong rest upon knowledge, so that evil ultimately means ignorance, that is unenlightenment by reason. The particle of reason is called in ch. 4 an effluence from the mind which administers the Universe. In ch. 2 it is identified with the governing element in man, the central understanding. That it is here called a particle is in accordance with the Stoic teaching, which gives a material substratum to consciousness, inasmuch as the whole world revealed to our consciousness is matter informed by energy. We are reminded of St. Augustine's struggle with materialistic presuppositions: 'How could it all profit me, so long as I thought that Thou, O Lord God, who art Truth, wast an infinite luminous body, and that I was a piece broken off that body', and of an expression of Sir Thomas Browne: 'there is surely a piece of divinity in us'.

The use of the analogy from the bodily organism to the political union of man is familiar from its employment in St. John's gospel and in St. Paul's epistles. Marcus' great physician, Galen, whose teaching is probably reflected in the analysis of ch. 2, endeavoured to show in his work On the use of the parts of the body how the co-ordination, which Marcus illustrates from the limbs, the jaw, and the eyelids, runs through every physiological adaptation, and is, as he thinks, evidence of the ruling purpose of Nature in her works. The assumption that in man's life only moral good and moral evil are in fact good and evil is the boldest and most wholesome of the Stoic hypotheses: 'We understand', says Cicero, 'right to be such that, waiving all utility, it can be justly commended of itself, without any rewards or profits'.

'''Ch. 2.''' Man partakes with his fellow men in Mind, a portion of the Divine allotted to each man (ch. 1), whereby man himself is able to touch God (ch. 12). What then is that of which I say 'I am', that which is par excellence myself? In answer Marcus gives the broad popular distinction between soul and body, but divides the body, the psycho-physical organism, into the physical structure and the animating breath, the pneuma. For what is 282