Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/467

 springing up into everlasting life.' The contrast of the spring and the cistern appears also in modern literature, e.g.:

The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up; to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in!

Now for this consecrated fount Of murmuring, sparkling, living love, What have I, shall I dare to tell? A comfortless and hidden well.

'''Chs. 52–3.''' The chapter begins with a reminiscence of the man who becomes a stranger and exile in his own land, by cutting himself off from the common reason (iv. 29). Such a man is ignorant of the City in which he resides, and of what his own reasonable nature is. To care for fame is to care for the applause of such ignorant persons. Indeed (ch. 53), it is to esteem men who, as their conduct shows, do not even satisfy themselves.

'''Ch. 54.''' The dependence of man's intelligence upon the all-pervading Universal spirit is analogous with the dependence of man's vitality upon the atmosphere which surrounds him.

Many of the early physicists of Greece regarded the air as the origin of reason in man; they even identified the soul or spirit, which is the cause of perception and movement, with the atmosphere. This view the Stoics adopted, making the spirit of life and reason an all-pervasive power or energy upon which the existence of life in creatures, and of reason in all reasonable beings, depends. In ch. 57 the illumination of reason is made analogous with the light and energy radiated through the visible Universe by the sun, its source.

'''Chs. 55–6.''' A return to the topic of ch. 50. Evil, generally, cannot be injurious to the Universe, for it plays a part for good in the whole. Evil individually, viz. injury by one person of another, can only be real evil by the will of that other, who has the remedy in his own judgement. Each of us can by an exercise of will obviate moral injury. Thus my neighbour's will is in one Rh