ENGLISH COMMENTARY
intelligence, its power, in Plato's phrase,[1] 'to contemplate all time and all existence'. The language here shows a remarkable advance from the depreciation of intellectual adventure in the earlier Books.[2] Had Marcus been reading Plato's Republic and Theaetetus[3] once more, and reconsidering Pindar's words about the 'flight of the soul'? Perhaps he had meanwhile studied Galen's Introduction to the Sciences,[4] where the student is said 'not to shun geometry and astronomy but to "contemplate things below and above the firmament", as Pindar writes'. More probably he had in mind Lucretius' splendid passage[5] about 'passing beyond the flaming ramparts of the world'. There is a remarkable parallel to what Marcus writes here in Hegel.[6] 'This feeling that we are all our own is characteristic of freedom of thought, of that voyage into the open, where nothing is below or above us but we stand in solitude, alone by ourselves.'
The sudden drop from these lofty intellectual claims to the remark that a man in middle life can have learned all there is to know is surprising. Plato, indeed, both in the passage of the Republic and that of the Theaetetus cited above, contrasts the pettiness of human life with the philosopher's glance into eternity, but Marcus' point is that life here is always the same; a poor thing indeed, but a sufficient field for moral struggle and success. Certainly he turns to the gifts of the soul, love of fellows, truth, self-reverence, the honour due to Reason, somewhat as the apostle[7] passes from 'the liberty with which Christ has made us free' to the actual fruits of the Spirit.
This recognition of virtuous activity, which is the concrete aspect of the large and general claim to liberty, leads up to one of the sudden surprises of Marcus' reflection. The respect for self, which is respect for right Reason or the true Word, resembles, he says, the respect of Law for its own enactments. Thus the principle which governs the individual is identical with the Law which sustains society, and this is identical with Universal reason. The Daciers remark:[8] 'il y a dans ce passage une profondeur de
- ↑ Pl. Rep. vi, 486a, cited above at vii. 35.
- ↑ i. 7; i. 17. 9; ii. 13.
- ↑ He refers to the Theaetetus in x. 23.
- ↑ Galen, Protrepticus, ch. 1.
- ↑ Lucr. 1. 72.
- ↑ Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic, ch. 3, § 31.
- ↑ St. Paul, Gal. 5. i and 22–3.
- ↑ Réflexions Morales de l'Empereur Marc Antonin, ed. 1690, p. 670, where they cite 1 Cor. 2. 15.
