Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/376

 conclusion of Marcus' younger contemporary Galen. He closes his work on the Use of the bodily parts, after showing the marvels of organic structure even in the minutest living beings, by contrasting these corruptible, muddy, things with the purer manifestations of mind in the heavens. In much the same spirit Aristotle had vindicated his study of The Parts of Animals, and even more conspicuously Plato had depreciated all the things of sense by comparison with the ideas of pure Reason.

The curious little digression upon the distractions of books is repeated in ch. 3. It is a characteristic note of Roman Stoicism, this reminder that conduct is our concern, not theory. Cicero insists upon it in his Offices and it is a commonplace of Seneca's Moral Letters: 'we make a burden of life as well by our indulgence in literature as in all else', he writes to Lucilius. The moral is taken over by Montaigne: 'I have been pleased to see men in devotion vow ignorance, as well as chastity, poverty and penitence: 'tis also a gelding of our unruly appetites to blunt this cupidity that spurs on to the study of books.' The saying is echoed by Pope: 'or Learning's luxury or idleness', and there is no more frequent moral in Goethe's writings.

'''Ch. 3.''' 'You are not to repine at what is allotted to you, now or herafter.' This chapter takes up the close of the last, and rapidly reviews the variety of names which have been given to man's destiny, to all of which the Stoic philosophy tried to give a meaning agreeable to its system—The gods, Providence, Fortune, Nature, the web woven by the three Fates, Necessity, the advantage of the whole Universe, of which man is a part.

He begins with the works of the gods, which are 'full of Providence'. He means that from the parts of the world, where we can see the working of the gods, we can argue to a providential system, a care for us and for every part. To the Stoics the regular movements of the Heavens, of the Sun and other luminaries, visible gods as they held them to be, were plain evidence of a divine government of the Universe.

Next, the things of Fortune, the daily accidents of human life, are not in fact accidents but the effect of Nature, the result of 284