ENGLISH COMMENTARY
We cannot, however, read any philosophic theory into Marcus' words. They are poetical like Byron's 'why even the worm at last disdains her shatter'd shell'[1] or Tennyson's
And these are but the shattered stalks
Or ruined chrysalis of one.[2]
Ch. 37. Actions, our neighbour's as our own, are to be tested by their relation to the whole to which they belong, especially by the relation of human purpose to an end.[3]
Ch. 38. Whatever the right interpretation of the hard saying in x. 7. 3, Marcus here says that the higher self, the mind (or Psyche as he sometimes calls it), is seated in the man as a controlling motive cause. This no doubt is the strict sense of the term so often used, the governing principle. The view is Platonic rather than Stoic, if we take it to express a metaphysical theory, and implies that the intellectual soul is not united to the body as the form in the material but as a motive cause to that which is moved, the view of Plato in the Laws, Book x. Here the statement leads to the opening chapter of Book xi and, if not pressed unduly, is intelligible to a simple mind, whatever its difficulties to a scientific thinker or to a philosopher. Like Marcus, Butler says: 'Upon the whole then our organs of sense and our limbs are certainly instruments, which the living persons, ourselves, make use of to perceive and move with'; and he goes further and says: 'it follows that our organized bodies are no more ourselves or part of ourselves than any other matter around us.'[4]
BOOK XI
This Book is made up out of two distinct parts. The first twenty-one chapters consist, in Marcus' familiar manner, of longer reflections interspersed with brief practical reflections or admonitions. The last seventeen chapters are mere extracts from a commonplace book, resembling in this some chapters of Book vii, but with the difference that they have little intrinsic merit and no bearing upon the rest of the Book, and that none of them bears the authentic stamp of the author's thought or expression.
