ENGLISH COMMENTARY
man's soul, which is not visible, from his activities. This form of proof is very frequent in second-century literature, for example in the Christian apology of Minucius Felix, in Theophilus of Antioch, in Apuleius, and in the De Mundo. Galen's book On the Use of the Parts is a cumulative argument from the adaptation of the organism to its functional activities to the existence of a God who manifests himself even more perfectly in the order of the heavens. Of this book Sir Thomas Browne[1] says: 'therefore, sometimes and in some things, there appears to me as much Divinity in Galen his Books De usu partium as in Suarez Metaphysics.' The Epicurean writings aimed at overthrowing this reasoning and substituting a scientific account based on atomism (x. 7. 2).
Ch. 29. The argument from effect to cause is an example of finding the form which underlies the material of experience. The duty of intellectual honesty corresponds with the practical duties of just dealing and truth speaking (ix. 1).
He adds an injunction to joy, to which he too rarely allows expression. This is the point in which Spinoza's Ethics differ so markedly from the Meditations, a difference depending presumably on a divergence of temperament in the writers.
Ch. 30. The duty of unifying our life by a continuous series of good actions suggests to Marcus this little rhapsody on the unity and continuity of the Universe (iv. 27; vi. 10). The purport is to give a view of the world which is vitalistic, in opposition to physical mechanism, and which resembles broadly much recent speculation which is dissatisfied with the explanation of the Universe predominating in the nineteenth century. The reason is that the Stoics and the school of Medicine to which Galen belonged worked from the analogy of life and living processes, their opponents approached the problem from the mechanico-physical end.
He begins with light, which unites what it illuminates (viii. 57; ix. 8), but with no suggestion of that worship of the Sun-god which became so widespread in the next century, for example in the Emperor Julian. He then follows the favourite idea of the Scale of Nature, mounting from the inanimate to the animate
- ↑ Browne, Religio Medici, i. 14.
