ENGLISH COMMENTARY
The same reasoning is used by Pascal:[1] 'Is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even should it last ten years more? In view of these infinities, all finites are equal.' The argument is that infinite time + 1 year = infinite time + 101 years, but it is false to conclude from this that one year of finite existence = 101 years.
Marcus prefers to say that life consists of separate units, only one of which is destroyed by death; one day is negligible by comparison with infinite time; so that the old man and the child alike lose only a negligible duration of existence, one day.
The second reflection (about the sameness of experience) is given identically in Lucretius:[2] 'all things remain the same if you live a very long life, and still more so if you were never to die.' He seems to have in mind the misery of Tithonus. The points made by both writers appear to be subtle perhaps, but false and frigid, like Pope's:
The blest to-day is as completely so
As who began a thousand years ago,[3]
which is, some critics suppose, what Marcus intends here.
Ch. 15. Monimus, a Cynic philosopher, used to say: 'Everything is fancy'; 'Everything is vanity'. He went further in his scepticism, declaring that what men take for reality is like the background in a theatre,[4] 'the painted veil called life'.
The objection which was taken is obvious, says Marcus; no doubt it was the retort that, if the dictum were true, his own scepticism was itself an illusion. We can, however, take the dictum for our own use, to correct man's vain affectation of himself and his knowledge. Marcus sometimes himself speaks[5] as if all man's life were a dream and a delirium, as though he thought 'our little life is rounded with a sleep'.
He normally uses Monimus' text, however, to mean that everything depends upon our judgement about it, nothing is good or bad but 'thinking makes it so'.[6] If the reason is truly awake, the
- ↑ Pensées, Sect. ii. 72 Brunschvicg.
- ↑ Lucr. 3. 947.
- ↑ Essay on Man, 1. 75.
- ↑ Sextus Emp. Math. 7. 88, cf. 8. 5. Pascal says 'l'imagination dispose de tout' and refers to an Italian book: Della opinione regina del mondo; ii, § 82 Br.
- ↑ M. Ant. ii. 17; iv. 3. 4.
- ↑ Ibid. iii. 9; iv. 39; xii. 8, 22, 25, and 26.
