ENGLISH COMMENTARY
the self is no absorption in the self, but an appeal by the self to the reasonable principles of philosophy, as may be seen from the simple truths which he gives as those to which the self returns. This explains the connexion with ch. 4. By withdrawing from all outward distractions to the reasonable self, he is enabled to recognize the common law which unites him to his fellows and to the Universe, so that he can realize his membership with them in one eternal Commonwealth. The longing for repose and rest he meets by the challenge to live now and always by the reason of the mind which runs through all and governs all. A passage from Seneca will make the meaning clearer. He says: 'Let us have in mind two cities, one that great and truly universal city, the home of gods and of men, wherein we look neither to this little corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our fatherland by the sun. The other city is that bestowed upon us by the conditions of our birth. . . . To that greater city we can be servants in our hours of retirement, and perhaps better then, for then we may inquire of the nature of goodness . . .?[1]
What Marcus well says is that there is nothing to prevent our making the law of the Eternal City the rule of our daily life; there is nothing to prevent our closing the door (to use his image) for a moment upon the temporal, and renewing ourselves by the Eternal. Notice how he ignores all the easy commonplaces of essays upon exile, upon retirement, upon loss; the favourite topics that the soul can nowhere escape itself, that it bears its own burden into the retreats which it seeks, that:
All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.
He ends the fourth chapter with the argument that the existence of the Eternal City, thus established by reason, is proof that man's reason flows from the reason which rules and inspires the City of God. He leaves room for an immaterial origin of the reason of man, but he seems himself to be referring to a doctrine of Aristotle's school, viz. that the reasonable self is derived from a fifth element, which inhabits the region of the fiery ether. He clearly distinguishes the source of man's reason from the fire which is the origin of the quickening spirit in the body, the
- ↑ Sen. De Otio, iv. 1.
