ENGLISH COMMENTARY
sameness, and inexorable law of Nature and Time. Ch. 20 is again a little irrelevant, in appearance, to the context.
Ch. 22. The best statement in the Meditations of the maxim 'Love your enemy', which in Roman Stoicism, at least, redeems the notorious arrogance of the Stoic creed. Marcus justifies the maxim by these reasons:[1] he is your kinsman, one with you in origin; he errs unwittingly and therefore unwillingly; both he and you will soon be numbered with the dead; it is not in his power to harm you.
But no theoretic statement does justice to the spirit of Marcus' life and profession. 'If a man's mind be truly inflamed with charity, it doth work him suddenly into greater perfection than all the doctrine of morality can do, which is but a sophist in comparison of the other.'[2]
Chs. 23 and 25. The connexion between these two chapters is broken by the insertion of ch. 24 out of place. Nature is like an artist[3] modelling wax into successive forms, each short-lived. By continual change she renews the Universe. The individual cannot reasonably complain either of his creation or of his dissolution.
In his sermon on Death Bossuet has a passage which may have been inspired by ch. 23: 'Tout nous appelle à la mort; la nature, comme si elle était presque envieuse du bien qu'elle nous a fait, nous déclare souvent et nous fait signifier qu'elle ne peut pas nous laisser longtemps ce peu de matière qu'elle nous prete.. . . . Elle en a besoin pour d'autres formes: elle le redemande pour d'autres usages.'
Ch. 24. A parallel is drawn, as in ch. 37, between the mind's control over the expression of the face and its control over itself. The text is corrupted, but we may suppose that his point was that as an evil expression becomes unalterably set, so an engrained bad habit makes the mind hardened until even the consciousness of evil is dead. The Greek word for conscience occurs only here and at the end of vi. 30. 2 in the Meditations. The thought underlying the chapter is that as life consists in perpetual alteration, so death is loss of the power to change.
Ch. 26. Marcus resumes the subject of ch. 22. Pity is no longer
