ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Chs. 38–45. Chapter 36 mediates the return to the principal theme of the Book. We are to consider the overruling Reason and to submit our wills to its providence, to think of the Universe as a single whole, where what befalls ourselves is purposeful, and what benefits us also benefits our neighbour. This group of chapters illustrates the theme variously.
Ch. 38. A fuller reference to the unity and unification of Nature.[1] He adds here 'the bond of all things', one of the many Stoic phrases to express the belief in a necessary chain of antecedents and consequents, the necessary connexion which made the assertion of human freedom a paradox. Plutarch had criticized this view in the first century, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Aristotelian commentator (circa a.d. 200), attempts to destroy it in his De Fato. Here too we have the sole reference in the Meditations to the 'movement of stress', the mysterious force of 'spirit', which penetrates all things and at any given place and time holds the balance between attraction and repulsion, or contraction and expansion. Galen appears to entertain the notion as a possible explanation of the movement set up by muscular contraction.
Next Marcus refers to the 'sympathy', by which actio in distans was explained by his school. Galen says that Hippocrates held the doctrine of a sympathy in the physical organism, and to this Leibniz refers: 'Wherefore it follows that this intercommunication of things extends to any distance, however great. And consequently every body feels the effect of all that takes place in the universe, so that he who sees all might read in each what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or will happen, observing in the present that which is far off as well in time as in place: tout est conspirant, as Hippocrates said.'[2] Marcus[3] uses the language of this theory, when he speaks of a branch remaining in living relation with the organism of the tree.
Ch. 39. Thus in ch. 39, the corollary is that man is by love to his neighbour to 'fit himself into' (the word might mean 'tune himself to accord with') the scheme of things of which he is a fated member.
