ENGLISH COMMENTARY
m'effraie'.[1] Collier's translation of ch. 24 seems to have suggested to Pope: 'His time a moment, and a point his space.'[2]
Ch. 25. Error arises from following one's private judgement, whereas duty is to identify the individual with the general will.
The offender's responsibility is his own, as Marcus said in iv. 26, repeating it at xi. 13, where the subject is treated more fully.
The phrase 'let him see to it', which is nearly equivalent to the Hebrew 'his blood be on his own head', occurs in the New Testament in two remarkable places, St. Matt. 27. 4 and 24, Acts 18. 15.
Ch. 26. Marcus here distinguishes the subconscious changes, the smooth or broken movement of the nerve-current (animal spirit) in the psycho-physical organism, from their effects in consciousness, which arise from the sympathetic reaction of the central self. He does not pretend that we can ignore this reaction—
we are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the Mind
To suffer with the body[3]—
indeed he takes the same standpoint as Epicurus did (ix. 41). We cannot ignore the resultant effects, only we are not to judge either that they are good, if pleasant, or evil, if painful. His difference from Epicurus is that the latter insisted on treating the pleasures of the mind and higher self as of the same kind with sensual pleasures, and as good. For Marcus only moral activity is good, the emotion which accompanies it is its consequent and concurrent.
Ch. 27. This is the one place in the Meditations where man is thought able to live in the society of the gods. Usually Marcus speaks of following in God's footsteps, a Pythagorean simile, or making oneself like God, a Platonic ideal.
Ch. 28. Marcus only occasionally indulges the cynical vein in which he most resembles Persius of Roman authors. Both reveal in such passages as this a delicate aesthetic sensibility, almost as if evil were distasteful more than shocking to them. The passage illustrates the view that vice is due to ignorance and can be remedied by reviving in the evil-doer his latent knowledge of good and evil. Marcus speaks here like a physician who is not
