ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Vitalism), which is in principle identical with the Stoic view of the Universe. The thought is that which Mephistopheles expresses in Faust:[1] 'He who would know and describe what is alive, seeks first to expel its spirit. Then he holds the parts in his hand but alas! the spiritual bond is wanting. Chemistry terms it encheiresis naturae, mocks itself and knows it not'; words which have often been used in argument against a merely atomic or mechanical explanation of Nature.
Ch. 46. These quotations from Heraclitus, the great Ionian nature-philosopher of the beginning of the fifth century b.c., who was a kind of prophet to the Stoics, suggest the question whether his book still survived in the second century and was known to Marcus. There was a contemporary interest in his work, as we see from the frequent quotations of him, especially in Christian writers; he serves to illustrate a point or to embellish their compositions.
The first quotation here is the kernel of the doctrine of continuous and ordered change (chs. 3, § 2, 4 and 29). The rest illustrate the moral doctrine, which was adumbrated in Heraclitus and worked out by the Stoics. The Commonwealth, Marcus says, rests upon the Logos, or common Reason; as a drunken man, who is immersed in the senses, misses the road home (iv. 29; vi. 22), so the multitude are at variance with the universal law, which is in truth always near them, and find what they meet every day to be strange and foreign to them (iv. 29). They are in the slumber of the senses, but we must not be like men who sleep,[2] although sleepers do in fact play their part in the whole (vi. 42); neither must we be like children who accept things from their parents instead of using their own reason.
Ch. 48. Compare iii. 3 and vi. 47. Here the destruction ot famous cities, like Pompeii, is included in the catalogue of things vanishing. The sudden destruction of Bura and Helice in Achaia (373 b.c.) is described by Pausanias,[3] but he was more moved by the decline of Megalopolis from its former greatness than by these sudden cataclysms. So too was the 'Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind', Sulpicius Rufus, in the famous letter to
