BOOK IX
father,[1] and finding there many other alterations, changes, and cessations, ask thyself: Is there anything terrible here? No, nor any in the ending and quiescence and change of the whole of life.[2]
22. Speed to the ruling Reason of thyself, and of the Universe, and of thy neighbour of thine own, that thou mayest make it just; of that of the Universe, that thou mayest therewithal remember of what thou art a part; of thy neighbour, that thou mayest learn whether it was ignorance with him or understanding, and reflect at the same time that it is akin to thee.
23. As thou thyself art a part perfective of a civic organism, let also thine every act be a part perfective of civic life. Every act of thine then that has no relation direct or indirect to this social end, tears thy life asunder and destroys its unity, and creates a schism, just as in a commonwealth does the man who, as far as in him lies, stands aloof from such a concord of his fellows.
24. Children's squabbles and make-believe, and little souls bearing up corpses[3]—the Invocation of the Dead[4] might strike one as a more vivid reality!
25. Go straight to that which makes a thing what it is, its formative cause,[5] and, isolating it from the material, regard it so. Then mark off the utmost time for which the individual object so qualified is calculated to subsist.
- ↑ Pius. See on i. 17. § 3.
- ↑ cp. Lucian, de Luct. 15.
- ↑ iv. 41 πνευμάτιον = ψυχάριον.
- ↑ Possibly refers to the Νέκυια of Homer (Od. xi.). Menippus (Diog. Laert. Men. 6) also wrote a Νέκυια (cp. above, vi.47). But it was a term for the invocation of the dead, see Just. Ap. i. 18.
- ↑ To the Formative, or Efficient Cause, of things is due not only that they exist, but that they are what they are. To translate the words here literally by the quality of the Cause conveys no meaning. cp. vi. 3.
