1. The power which rules within us, when its state is accordant with
nature, so acts in every occurrence as easily to adapt itself to all
present or possible situations. It requires no set material to work
upon, but, under proper reservation, needs but the incitement to
pursue, and makes matter for its activities out of every
opposition. Even so a fire masters that which is cast upon it, and
though a small flame would have been extinguished, your great blaze
quickly makes the added fuel its own, consumes it, and grows mightier
therefrom.
2. Let no action be done at random, nor otherwise than in complete
accordance with the principles involved.
3. Men seek retirement in the country, on the sea-coast, in the
mountains; and you too have frequent longings for such distractions.
Yet surely this is great folly, since you may retire into yourself at
any hour you please. Nowhere can a man find any retreat more quiet and
more full of leisure than in his own soul; especially when there is
that within it on which, if he but look, he is straightway quite at
rest. And rest I hold to be naught else but perfect order in the
soul. Constantly, therefore, allow yourself this retirement, and so
renew yourself. Have also at hand thoughts brief and fundamental,
which readily may occur; sufficing to shut out the discordant clamour
of the world, and to send you back without fretting at the task to
which you return. For at what do you fret? At the wickedness of
mankind. Recollect the maxim that all reasoning beings are created for
one another, that to bear with them is a part of justice, and that
they cannot help their sin. Remember how many of those who lived in
enmity, suspicion, and hatred, at daggers drawn, have been stretched
on their funeral pyres, and turned to ashes. Remember and cease from
your complaints. Is it your allotted part in the world's destiny that
chagrins you? Be calm, and renew your knowledge of the alternative,
that "Either providence directs the world, or there is nothing but
unguided atoms;" and recollect the many proofs that the Universe is as
it were a state. Do the ills of the body still have power to touch
you? Reflect that the mind, once withdrawn within itself, once grown
conscious of its own power, has no concern with the motions, rough or
smooth, of the breathing body. Remember, too, all that you have heard
and assented to concerning pain and pleasure. Are you distracted by
the poor thing called fame? Think how swiftly all things are
forgotten. Behold the chaos of eternity which besets us on either
side. Think how empty is the noisy echo of acclamation; how fickle and
how scant of judgment are they who would seem to praise us, and how
narrow the bounds within which their praise is confined. All the earth
is but a point in the Universe; how small a corner of that little is
inhabited, and even there how few are they and of how little worth who
are to praise us! Remember then that there ever remains for you
retirement into the little field within. And, above all, be neither
distraught nor overstrained. Hold fast your freedom: consider all
things as a man of courage, as a human being, as a citizen, as a
mortal. Readiest among the principles to which you look let there be
these two: Firstly, things external do not touch the soul, but remain
powerless without; and all trouble comes from what we think of them
within. Secondly, all things visible change in a moment, and are gone
for ever. Recollect all the changes of which you have yourself been a
witness. The world is a succession of changes: life is but thought.
4. If mind be common to us all, the reason in virtue of which we are
rational is also common; so too is the power which bids us do or not
do. Therefore we have all a common law; and if so, we are
fellow-citizens and members of some common polity. The Universe, then,
must in a manner be a state, for of what other common polity can all
mankind be said to be members? Wherefore it is from this common state
that we derive our intellectual power, our reason, and our law; or
whence do we derive them? For that which is earthy in me is derived
from earth, my moisture from some other element, my breath and what is
warm or fiery from their proper sources. And therefore, as nothing can
arise from nothing or return thereto, my intellectual part has also a
source.
5. Death, like birth, is a mystery of nature; the one a compounding of
elements, the other a resolution into the same. In neither is there
anything shameful or against the nature of the rational animal, or
contrary to the law of its constitution.
6. It is fate that such actions should come from such men. He who
would have it otherwise would have figs without juice. This, too, you
should remember: that in a very short time both you and he must die;
and a little after not even the name of either shall remain.
7. Suppress the thought; and the cry "I am hurt!" is gone. Suppress "I
am hurt!" and you suppress the injury.
8. What makes not a man worse than he was, makes not his life worse,
nor hurts him without or within.
9. The law of utility must act so.
10. All that happens, happens right: you will find it so if you
observe narrowly. I mean not only according to a natural order, but
according to our idea of justice, and, as it were, by the action of
one who distributes according to merit. Go on then observing this as
you have begun, and whatever you do, let your aim be goodness,
goodness as it is rightly understood. Hold to this in every action.
11. Think not as your insulter judges or wishes you to judge: but see
things as they truly are.
12. For two things be ever ready: First, to do that only which reason,
the sovereign and legislative faculty, suggests for the good of
mankind: Secondly, to change your course on meeting any one who can
correct and alter your opinion. But let the change be made because you
really believe it to be in the interest of justice or the public good,
or such like, and not with any view to pleasure or glory for yourself.
13. Have you reason? I have. Why then do you not use it? When it
performs its proper office what more do you require?
14. You exist as part of a whole. You will disappear again in that
which produced you; or rather you will change and be resumed again
into the productive intelligence.
15. Many grains of frankincense are laid on the same altar. One falls
soon, another later. It makes no difference.
16. Within ten days, if you return to the observance of moral
principles and to the cult of reason, you will appear a God to them
who now esteem you a wild beast or an ape.
17. Order not your life as though you had ten thousand years to
live. Fate hangs over you. While you live, while yet you may, be good.
18. How much he gains in leisure who looks not to what his neighbours
say, or do, or intend; but considers only how his own actions may be
just and holy, looking not, as Agathon says, to the moral example of
others, but running a straight course and never turning therefrom.
19. He who is careful and troubled about the fame which is to live
after him considers not that each one of those who remember him must
very soon die himself, and thereafter also the succeeding generation,
until every memory of him, handed on by excited and ephemeral
admirers, dies utterly away. Grant that your memory were immortal, and
those immortal who retain it; yet what is that to you? I ask not, what
is that to the dead? But to the living what is the profit in praise,
except it be in some convenience that it brings? And you now abandon
what nature has put in your power in order to set your hopes upon the
report of others.
20. Whatever is beautiful at all is beautiful in itself. Its beauty
ends there, and praise has no part in it. Nothing is the better or the
worse for being praised; and this holds also of what is beautiful in
the common estimation: of material forms and works of art. Thus true
beauty needs nothing beyond itself, any more than law, or truth, or
kindness, or honour. For none of these gets a single grace from praise
or one blot from censure. Does the emerald lose its virtue if one
praise it not? Can one by scanting praise depreciate gold, ivory, or
purple, a lyre or a dagger, a flower or a shrub?
21. If our souls survive us, how, you ask, has the air contained them
from eternity? How, I answer, does the earth contain so many bodies
buried during so long a time? Just as corpses, after remaining for a
while in the earth, change, and are dissipated to make room for
others; so also the souls, liberated into air, remain for a little,
and then are changed, diffused, rekindled, and resumed into the
universal productive spirit; and so give way to others who come to
take their places. This may serve for an answer, on the supposition
that the soul survives the body. But we have not merely to consider
the number of bodies thus buried in the earth. There are also all the
living creatures eaten day by day by ourselves and other animals. How
great a multitude of them is thus consumed, and as it were buried in
the bodies of those who feed upon them. Yet there is ever space to
contain them, owing to the changes into blood, air, and fire. What,
then, is the key to this enquiry? Discrimination of matter and cause.
22. Swerve not from your path. In every impulse render justice its
due, and in all thinking be sure that you understand.
23. I am in tune with all that is of thy harmony, O Nature. For me
nothing is too early and nothing is too late that comes in thy good
time. All is fruit to me, O Nature, that thy seasons bring. From thee
are all things, thou comprehendest all, and all returns to thee. The
poet says, "O dear City of Cecrops!" Shall I not say, "Dear City of
God!"
24. "Do few things," says the philosopher, "if you would have quiet."
This is perhaps a better saying, "Do what is necessary, do what the
reason of the being that is social in its nature directs, and do it in
the spirit of that direction." By this you will attain the calm that
comes from virtuous action, and that calm also which comes from having
few things to do. Most things you say and do are not necessary. Have
done with them, and you will be more at leisure and less perturbed. On
every occasion, then, ask yourself the question, Is this thing not
unnecessary? And put away not only unnecessary deeds but unnecessary
thoughts, for by so doing you will avoid all superfluous actions.
25. Make trial how the life of a good man succeeds with you, the life
of one who is content with the lot appointed him by Providence, and
satisfied with the justice of his own actions and the benevolence of
his disposition.
26. You have seen the other state, make trial also of this. Avoid
perplexity; seek simplicity. Has a man sinned? He bears his own
sin. Has aught befallen you? It is well; for all that befalls you is
an ordained part in the weaving of the destiny of all things from the
beginning. In sum, life is short. Make the best of the present in
reason and in justice. Be sober in your relaxation.
27. The Universe is either an ordered whole or a confusion. But,
although a mixture of phenomena, it is certainly an ordered whole. Or,
do you think that there can be order in you and confusion in the
Universe, and that too when all things, though diffused and separated,
are all in sympathy, one with another?
28. Consider the deformity of these characters: the black or
malicious, the effeminate, the savage, the beastly, the childish, the
brutish, the stupid, the false, the ribald, the knavish, the
tyrannical.
29. He is a foreigner, and not a citizen of the world, who knows not
what the world contains; and he, too, who knows not what happens in
it. He is a deserter who flies from the reason that rules this
polity. He is blind, whose intellectual eye is closed. He is a beggar,
who needs the gifts of others, and has not from himself all that is
necessary for life. He is an excrescence on the scheme of things, who
withdraws and separates himself from the reasoned constitution of the
nature in which he shares, by discontent with what befalls. That same
nature which produces this event produced thee. He is the seditious
citizen who separates his particular soul from the one soul of all
reasonable beings.
30. One acts the philosopher without a coat, another without books, a
third half-naked. Says one, "I have not bread, and yet I hold to
reason." Says another, "I have not even the spiritual food of
instruction, and yet I hold to it."
31. Love the art which you have learned, humble though it be, and in
it find your recreation. And spend the remainder of your life as one
who with all his heart commits his concerns to the Gods, and neither
acts the tyrant nor the slave to any of mankind.
32. Recall, for example, the age of Vespasian. It is as the spectacle
of our own time. You will see men marrying, bringing up children, sick
and dying, warring and feasting, trading and farming. You will see men
flattering, obstinate in their own will, suspecting, plotting, wishing
for the death of others, repining at fortune, courting mistresses,
hoarding treasure, pursuing consulships and kingdoms. Yet all that
life is spent and gone. Come down to Trajan's days. Again all is the
same; and again, that life, too, is dead. Consider, likewise, the
records of other times and nations, and see how, after their fit of
eagerness, all quickly fell, and were resolved into the elements. But
most of all, remember those whom you yourself have known, men who were
distracted about vain things, men who neglected the course which
suited their own nature, neither holding fast to it nor finding their
contentment there. And, herein, forget not that care is to be bestowed
on any enterprise only in proportion to its proper worth. For if you
keep this in mind you will not be disheartened from over concern with
things of less account.
33. The familiar phrases of old days are now strange and obsolete;
and, likewise, the names of such as were once much celebrated now
sound strangely in our ears. Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Leonnatus;
after them Scipio and Cato; lastly, Augustus, Hadrian, and
Antonine--all are forgotten. All things hasten to an end, shall
speedily seem old fables, and then be buried in oblivion. This I say
of those who have shone with the brightness of their fame. The rest of
men, as soon as they expire, are unknown and forgotten. What, then, is
it to be remembered for ever? A wholly empty thing. For what should we
be zealous? For this alone, that our souls be just, our actions
unselfish, our speech ever sincere, and our disposition such as may
cheerfully embrace whatever happens, seeing it to be inevitable,
familiar, and sprung from the same source and origin as we ourselves.
34. Willingly resign yourself to Clotho, permitting her to spin her
thread of what yarn she may.
35. All things are for a day, both what remembers and what is
remembered.
36. Observe continually that all things exist in change; and keep this
thought ever with you, that Nature loves nothing more than changing
what things now are, and making others like them. For what now is, is
in a manner the seed of what shall be. Therefore, conceive not that
that alone is seed which is cast into the earth or the womb, for that
is the thought of ignorance.
37. You are presently to die, and yet you have not attained to
simplicity or calm, or to disbelief that you can be hurt by things
external. You have not learned to be kindly to all men, or to count
just dealing the whole of wisdom.
38. Scan closely that which governs men; see what are their cares, and
what they pursue or shun.
39. That which is evil for you exists not in the soul of another; nor
in any change or alteration of the body which surrounds you. Where,
then, is it? It lies in that part of you by which you apprehend what
evil is. Stay the apprehension, and all is well. And though the poor
body to which it is so closely bound be cut and burned, though it
suppurate or mortify, yet let the apprehension remain inactive: that
is, let it judge nothing either bad or good which can happen equally
to the bad man and to the good. For that which befalls equally him who
lives in accord, and him who lives in discord with Nature, can neither
be natural nor unnatural.
40. Ever consider this Universe as one living being, with one material
substance and one spirit. Observe how all things are referred to the
one intelligence of this being; how all things act on one impulse; how
all things are concurrent causes of all others; and how all things are
connected and intertwined.
41. "Thou art a poor soul, saddled with a corpse," said Epictetus.
42. There is no evil for things which subsist in change; and there can
be no good for things which subsist without it.
43. Time is a river, a violent torrent of things coming into
being. Each one, as soon as it has appeared, is swept away: it is
succeeded by another which is swept away in its turn.
44. All that happens is as natural and familiar as a rose in spring,
or fruit in summer. Such are disease and death, calumny and treachery,
and all else which gives fools joy or sorrow.
45. Consequents follow antecedents by virtue of a special and
necessary connexion. This relation is not that which exists in a mere
enumeration of independent things, and depends merely on some
arbitrary convention. It is a rational relationship. And just as
things now existing are ranged harmoniously together, so those which
come into existence display no bare succession, but a wonderful
harmony with what preceded.
46. Remember always the sayings of Heraclitus: that the death of earth
is to become water, the death of water to become air, and the death of
air to become fire; and so conversely. Remember in what a case he is
who forgets whither the way leads: that men are frequently at variance
with their close and constant companion, the reason which rules all:
that men count strange that which they meet every day: that we should
neither act nor speak as though in slumber, although even in slumber
we seem to act and speak; nor yet like children learning from their
parents, with a mere acceptance of everything just as we are told it.
47. If some God were to inform you that you must die tomorrow, or the
next day at farthest, you would take little concern whether it was to
be tomorrow or the next day; that is if you were not the most
miserable of cowards. For how small is the difference? Wherefore,
account it of no great moment whether you die after many years or
tomorrow.
48. Constantly consider how many physicians are dead and gone, who
frequently knitted their brows over their patients; how many
astrologers, who foretold the deaths of others with great ostentation
of their art; how many philosophers, who wrote endlessly on death and
immortality; how many warriors, who slew their thousands; and how many
tyrants, who used their power of life and death with cruel wantonness,
as though they had been immortal. How many whole cities, if I may so
speak, are dead: Helice and Pompeii and Herculaneum, and others past
counting. Tell over next all those you have known, one after the
other: think how one buried his fellow, then lay dead himself, to be
buried by a third. And all this within a little time. In sum, look
upon human things, and behold how short-lived and how vile they are;
mucus yesterday, tomorrow ashes or pickled carrion. Spend, then, the
fleeting remnant of your time in a spirit that accords with Nature,
and depart contentedly. So the olive falls when it is grown ripe,
blessing the ground from whence it sprung, and thankful to the tree
that bore it.
49. Be like a promontory against which the waves are always
breaking. It stands fast, and stills the waters that rage around
it. "Wretched am I," says one, "that this has befallen me." "Nay," say
you, "happy am I who, though this has befallen me, can still remain
without sorrow, neither broken by the present nor dreading the
future." The like might have befallen any one; but every one would not
have endured it unpained. Why, then, should we dwell more on the
misfortune of the incident than on the felicity of such strength of
mind? Can you call that a misfortune for a man which is not a
miscarriage of his nature? And can you call anything a miscarriage of
his nature which is not contrary to its purpose? You have learned its
purpose, have you not? Then does this accident debar you from
justice, magnanimity, prudence, wisdom, caution, truth, honour,
freedom, and all else in the possession of which man's nature finds
its full estate? Remember, therefore, for the future, upon all
occasions of sorrow, to use the maxim: this thing is not misfortune,
but to bear it bravely is good fortune.
50. It is a vulgar meditation, and yet very effectual for enabling us
to despise death, to consider the fate of those who have been most
earnestly tenacious of life, and enjoyed it longest. Wherein is their
gain greater than that of those who died before their time? They are
all lying dead somewhere or other. Cadicianus, Fabius, Julian,
Lepidus, and their fellows, saw the corpses of multitudes carried to
the grave, and then themselves were carried thither. In sum, how small
was the difference of time, spent painfully amid what troubles, among
what worthless men, and in how mean a carcase! Think it not a thing of
value. Rather look back into the eternity that gapes behind, and
forward into the other abyss of immensity. Compared with such
infinity, small is the difference between a life of three days and one
of three ages like Nestor's.
51. Run ever the short way. The short way is the way according to
Nature. Therefore speak and act according to the soundest rule; for
this resolution will free you from much toil and warring, and from all
artful management and ostentation.
END OF THE FOURTH BOOK.