Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/488

 difficult, ever since Gataker himself said that he 'stuck in it'. The difficulty is due to the obscurity of the problem at issue, namely, the meaning of individuality, but also to uncertainty as to the exact doctrine of the Stoic school in this question as well as that of Marcus himself.

He begins with a reflection familiar to-day, but then something of a paradox to the ordinary man. What passes away at death is a composite frame, built up only yesterday out of the solid and gaseous matter which the organism absorbed from food solids and the atmosphere it breathed. We cannot then take the popular view that death means that the breath leaves the body, for the breath (the vital spirit) is itself a material element in the compound. Neither is what passes away the same as what came into the visible world at birth; obviously that too was a composition of elements gradually brought together in the womb by Nature's formative energy. See what he says below in ch. 26.

Death then, as he stated in § 2, is a disintegration of a composite whole, either, as Epicurus held, into atoms or into the elements which the Stoics believed to be its basis. Death is merely one instance of the 'alteration' which obtains in the universe generally. That 'alteration' is a rearrangement of matter or substance by which nothing is lost of the whole material which Nature disposes.

Then, as I understand the last words, Marcus says: 'Suppose for a moment that, as Epicurus and the school of medicine of Asclepiades held, you yourself are merely an intimate union of this changing composite, this continually integrating and disintegrating 'body', with the individuality which has persisted throughout your life, what then?' The answer is in the words which close the chapter, 'that hypothesis and its implications have nothing to do with my present argument'. His present argument is that death is an example of a universal law in this world of generation and decay, therefore it is not something of which we are entitled to complain, being, in the view of Epicurus and Zeno alike, a necessary incident of the life we know.

Paul Fournier gives as his opinion that Marcus here gives last and final expression to a pantheism which leaves no room for individual existence beyond the grave. Is it not rather true that the wise Emperor is reminding himself that our concern is with the present and with present dutiful action? Personal survival is 396