ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Marcus gives a summary statement of the view of the Universe which the Stoics adopted. The whole is one substance, with one informing Logos or Reason, metaphorically called soul, principle of life (v. 32; vi. 1 and 4). The Stoics used the term 'Unification (Henosis)' to express this (vi. 10; vii. 32; viii. 34). All the parts of this unity are connected by a kind of fellow-feeling, or sympathy, as all the constituent members of a living organism appear to be (vi. 38; vii. 9). Marcus nowhere gives the arguments for this hypothesis, but he illustrates it from the interrelation of the elements of physical bodies, the social instincts of animals, the connexion of the sun, the planets, and the stars (ix. 9). This term 'sympathy' was originally a term of magic, but is characteristically adopted by the school in a professedly scientific sense; it was used in a different sense by the Neoplatonists. The argument from the coincidence between changes of the astronomical bodies and mundane phenomena, for instance the relation between the moon's phases and the tides, was a favourite one for exhibiting this presumed sympathy.
Ch. 41. This quotation from Epictetus is again referred to in ix. 24. It is singularly out of place here, since the body of man is in no sense a dead body but, like the Universe in the last chapter, a living substance informed by soul.
Chs. 42–4. From the scientific point of view, derived from Heraclitus, the terms 'good' and 'evil' are inappropriate to the changing substance of the Universe (vii. 23; viii. 20 and 50). The next two chapters repeat the familiar themes of the transitory or finite nature of man's experience, and of its ordered recurrence in the annual seasons. The end of ch. 44 gets its force from its unexpectedness and is in the satirical manner rare with Marcus.
Ch. 45. This chapter is to be read with ch. 40, and the passages from other Books referred to there. Marcus is endeavouring to explain the Stoic doctrine of the unification or organic character of the Universe. He attempts this by contrasting a group of numbers in mutual exclusion, that is, in fact, exclusive units which are no series, with the reciprocal action of individual realities or intelligible unities. Galen, often elsewhere a severe critic of the Stoics or of reasoners who professed Stoicism, holds very firmly to an organic doctrine in Physiology (a kind of early
