ENGLISH COMMENTARY
but he certainly does not hold that things hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed to babes. Again, the spirit or mind described in the third sentence can hardly be other than the mind of the whole. No finite mind can have knowledge of the beginning and the end, and of the reason which orders all and runs through all being. Does Marcus mean then that no human spirit is master of art and knowledge? This would explain why the seeming masters are confounded by the uninstructed.
Chs. 33–5. Not even the sad tone of ch. 10 has prepared the reader for what is the most extreme expression in the Meditations of the little worth, the evil of this present life. The powerful phrases and the quotation from Hesiod add to the effect of the sober close, where the writer, leaving the future an open question, reaffirms as a present duty what is the central lesson of this Book. The next two chapters continue the lesson, and give reasons for confidence in the victory of goodness in spite of what was said in the first part of ch. 33.
Ch. 36. The internal connexion of this chapter is puzzling and the text is partly corrupt. The opening sentence shows by its language that Marcus has in mind a chapter of Epictetus.[1] There it is said that when you see a man carried away by his grief, say at the loss of a child, your imagination is not to be carried away by the suggestion of his lamentations. You may sympathize with him and even lament with him, but within you are not to grieve. The reason given is the familiar one that the loss, properly conceived, is not an evil; the evil lies in the inward judgement.
Thus we must supply at the beginning of the chapter some words like: 'When you see a man carried away by a supposed loss.' Marcus says you are not to imagine his loss to be a real evil; the apparent evil is external, it lies in circumstance, your judgement tells you that it is not a hurt.
He illustrates this from a reference to an old man, perhaps a foster father, in some lost comedy. When he left, he used to beg to take away his charge's top with him, but he did not forget that it was a toy.
The rest of this part of the chapter is corrupt, but the general drift is that if you allow yourself to entertain sorrow because your
- ↑ Manual (Encheiridion), ch. 16.
