ENGLISH COMMENTARY
there is no good in the strict sense for man save the good of human personality:
to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.[1]
To true good and evil, to right and wrong, are contrasted what the Stoic school called 'indifferent' ends: life and death, riches and poverty, good report and evil report, pleasures and pains. Self-respect and self-reverence are the virtues of the individual, as an individual, and they depend upon the judgement of the true man, his governing faculty, what we may term reasonable Will, something close to Conscience. This judgement is in our power to control, so that man's chief tasks are to be one with his fellow man and one with the providential system of which he is a part. Indeed his chief duty and privilege is to preserve his own soul, the indwelling Divinity, in holiness, because the reason in which he participates is derived from the Divine reason, a 'grain of glory mix'd with humbleness'.
Ch. 1. This morning meditation is not devotional, like the Pythagorean maxim: 'In the morning lift up your eyes to the heavens',[2] nor is it strictly an examen de conscience. It is rather a summary of moral precepts, stated rationally, even coldly, though as the writer proceeds we discover behind his words a strong religious, even at times an enthusiastic, strain of devotion. The form of the chapter is a dialogue with self or between two aspects of the self.[3] A problem is stated, an answer suggested. A second form, occasionally employed, is that of a dialogue between two persons.[4] Both forms were familiar to Marcus from Roman poetry and satire, beginning with Lucilius, but he uses them rarely. He can himself at times discover a vein of the satiric spirit, which is in so much of his country's literature. Normally he propounds maxims for his own guidance, and in so doing he not seldom seems to contemplate an unknown reader. The soul is 'discoursing with itself, concerning itself, in that active dialogue which is the "active principle" of the dialectic method as an instrument for the attainment of truth'.[5] The implication is that there is a division
