Page:The Bible of Nature, and Substance of Virtue.djvu/47

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THE STOIC PHILOSOPHY.

FROM THE MEDITATIONS OF MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS,

TRANSLATED BY R. GRAVES.

The whole period of human life is a mere point; our being frail and transient, our perception obscure, the whole frame of our body tending to putrefaction. The soul itself is the sport of passions. The freaks of fortune not subject to calculation or conjecture, fame is undistinguishing and capricious: in a word, every thing relating to our body is fleeting, and glides away like a stream, and the reveries of the soul are a vapor and a dream. Indeed, life itself is a continual warfare, and a pilgrimage in a strange country: and posthumous fame is near akin to oblivion. What then can conduct us safely on this journey of life? nothing but true wisdom or philosophy. Now this consists in cultivating and preserving from injury and disgrace that good genius within us, our soul, undisturbed and superior to pleasure and pain, not acting at random or doing any thing in vain, or with falsehood and dissimulation; to do or leave undone wliatevcr we please, without being influenced by the will or the opinion of other men. Moreover, to acquiesce in whatever comes to pass, either by accident or the decrees of fate, as proceeding from the same cause whence we ourselves are derived. On the whole, philosophy will teach us to wait for death with calmness and equanimity, as being no more than the dissolution of those elements of which every animal is composed. Now if no damage accrues to those several elements in their continual changes or migrations from one body to another, why should any one be apprehensive of an injury from the change of the whole? It is agreeable to the course of Na- ture; and what is such, cannot be evil.

We are all born for our mutual assistance; as the hands and feet and every part of the human body, are for the service of the whole; to thwart and injure each other, therefore, is contrary to [enlightened] Nature.

This whole person of mine, whatever I may think of it, consists only of a body, the vital spirit, and the rational soul or governing principle. This body or material substance is