ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Ch. 3. The last chapter had distinguished the man himself from his material environment, here he separates from the other elements of the complex self the mind itself. This governs the vital spirit which informs the body, making it a living creature, and the body itself.
This is the same psychological analysis as was used in ii. 2, except that the mind there was called 'the ruling self'. In x. 2 he had, more scientifically, distinguished in man the merely natural, the animate, and the rational. There, as here, he says that we are to care for the two lower aspects of the self, but that they are subordinated to the third, as in Nature the inferior is always for the sake of the superior. He does not, however, suggest an ideal in which the lower is brought, as it is in the Universe, into the service of the higher, but dwells earnestly on the need to separate the mind element from its natural environment; to dwell, as it were, entirely in the life of the spirit.
The image of the sphere of Empedocles has already been used in viii. 41 and xi, 12. He insists (ii. 14) on the soul's immediate concern, the present act and word. He refuses to concern himself, as Epicurus recommends one to do, with the pleasures of memory, and he deliberately closes his eyes to hope.
Ch. 4. From the description of the true self and self-centred goodness he passes to the question of self-respect, just as he passed in ii. 5–6 from the smooth and godlike life to the self-reverence, which is reverence for the godhead within. Similarly in iii. 4–5 he had said that the soldier who stands to his post needs no man's witness to his integrity.
Why, he asks drily, are we not content with the approval of our own conscience; why do we, whom Nature has taught to love ourselves before others, prefer their opinion of us to our own? The reason is that we in fact entertain thoughts and designs which we could not bear to expose before a god or a wise mentor; we do not really respect ourselves, are not sincerely candid within. And so we respect the opinion of others (from whom we hide our real thoughts) more than we respect ourselves, or our opinion of ourselves. Galen, in his Exhortation to Virtue, is so convinced that progress in virtue is difficult by oneself unaided that he counsels even older men to find some friend who should be with them and admonish them of their faults, though he does not go
