Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/424

 is stained by its frequent imaginations; the dyer's hand, as Shakespeare says, is coloured by what it works in. Marcus combines this truth with a law of mental association, by which ideas previously connected tend to reinstate themselves. We are therefore not only to control our imaginations (ch. 11) but to habituate ourselves to coherent trains of thought.

He gives two examples of such associated trains of thought in this chapter, and two further illustrations in chs. 17 and 18.

Most emphasis is laid upon his favourite doctrine that man's end is fellowship, and that in fellowship man discovers his benefit and his good. To establish this doctrine he appeals to the argument from structure and tendency in living organisms, how that in the animate kingdom universally there is a striving by each creature for its own good, to accomplish which it is constructed by Nature.

This 'natural adaptation' is accompanied by 'natural subordination'; the lower creatures are for the sake of the higher, the higher are for the sake of one another. The natural world exhibits a graded series, the Scala Naturae, what Sir Tho. Browne calls 'a stair or manifest scale of creatures'. Thus to subordination succeeds co-ordination, mutual services in the Kingdom of ends.

In reference to the last argument Marcus says that 'it has been demonstrated long ago', a reference probably to Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle, from whom the Stoics took the conception. To us it is familiar from St. Paul and St. John. It has been called a purely 'external teleology', but it is much more than this both in Christian and Stoic writers. In regard to the animal kingdom it had its bad effects, leading Aristotle to use it to justify, in the name of Nature, the perpetual tutelage of slaves, and, in both Christian and pagan thought, causing the erroneous conclusion that animals were made by God solely for the service of man. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this brought into being the Cartesian notion, adopted by Bossuet among other religious writers, that the creatures are merely animate mechanisms. This false theory has had far-reaching practical consequences in the treatment not only of animals but of the weaker races of man. The slave-trade of the eighteenth century is a strange outcome of supposed enlightenment. 332