ENGLISH COMMENTARY
The Emperor Julian[1] may have been thinking of this passage of the Meditations when he describes Marcus presenting himself in the conclave of the gods, 'his body transparent and translucent like to the purest and clearest flame.'
The description of the Universe seems to be derived from Plato: 'God, when forming the Universe, created mind in soul and soul in body, building them into one that he might be the framer of a work that should be most beautiful and most perfect in its nature.'[2] The saying, too, that the gods preserve this Universe is perhaps a reminiscence of Plato's statement that the Creator retired to his own solitude after accomplishing his work, and left the rest to the 'younger gods'.[3] Strictly this conception of God is inconsistent with the Stoic belief in a self-informed Whole, where an active spirit informs a passive matter, and the gods are embraced in one unity. The enthusiasm for a divine Universe, so remote and impersonal, is hardly to be understood except by the light of the Nature poetry of the early nineteenth century:
The One remains, the many change and pass,
and again:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all object of all thought,
And rolls through all things.[4]
Chs. 2–3. The thought of the writer passes from the soul or higher self to man, a composite creature, in the present world. Nature's scale, which manifests a gradual ascent from lifeless things to plant-life and thence to animals and to reasonable beings, is exhibited also in man both in his development from the embryo to maturity and in the structure of his being, when perfected by this process. The grown man's life is sustained by activities some of which resemble plant-life, his nourishment, growth, and reproduction, some mere animal life, his maintenance by respiration and by means of the senses and impulses, and finally the life of reason, his individual and social existence.
Man has a duty to observe the laws which govern these lower and higher activities of his complex constitution, but like Nature he must subordinate the claims of the lower to the higher, in each degree.
