ENGLISH COMMENTARY
The remedies which Marcus suggests are either negative, to expel or to wipe out the impression, or positive, to turn the mind to right word or act, whereupon the right imaginations will follow. He gives this a fuller treatment at viii. 7 and xi. 19; see also what he says at vii. 16, followed as it is by the little dialogue: 'What are you doing here, Imagination? Be off with you the way you came; I have no use for you. But you have come according to your ancient wont. I am not angry with you; only be off.' The explanation is that the psychical effect of being angry is to strengthen, instead of weakening, the intrusive fancy. Sometimes he speaks of these imaginations as conceptions or thoughts, a kind of higher power of the same thing (xii. 22 and 25).
Ch. 3. There are three points here. The first, that man's will must be made accordant with Nature's will or purpose, that is, we must generalize our wills; the second, that our real will is identical with the general will, and that we must recognize that in realizing this will we value ourselves at our proper worth, in other words should practise true self-love (v. 1.2). Thirdly, we can neglect the criticism of others because their wills are private or selfish wills. The chapter is influenced, directly or indirectly, by the teaching of Heraclitus:[1] 'We must follow the general Logos . . . but though the Logos is general, the many live as though they had a private understanding.' Again, in the last words Marcus appears to be thinking of 'the straight and crooked path of the fuller's brush, which is one'.[2] The spiral brush, which worked up and down and yet rotated, illustrates the reconciliation of the apparent opposition between the general and the particular.
Ch. 4. A beautiful variation upon the theme 'the earth that's nature's mother', only that Marcus makes the relation to be to the Whole, treating Earth as but one aspect of that Whole. When he says 'falling, I shall rest', he probably recalls another of Heraclitus' sayings:[3] 'it (the fiery principle) changes and it rests', that is, the Whole is subject to perpetual alternations of activity and of rest; of this, waking and sleeping, life and death are instances.
Ch. 5. Moral excellence is independent of intellectual acuteness, a favourite theme of Christian teachers. By reason, Marcus,
