ENGLISH COMMENTARY
Ch. 40. Nature is here contrasted with Art, quite in Aristotle's manner. The living principle lives within Nature's work. Man must reverence the power which works within him and obey its will.[1] All will then be to his mind, as the work of the Whole is to its mind.
Ch. 41. The secret of a good life is to avoid making any object which lies without our will the goal of our endeavour; to have as our end only our spiritual life. This in the Manual of Epictetus is the first of all maxims. The lower ends lead to strife with man and discontent with God.
Chs. 42–3. The truth which corrects the idea of wilful disunion at the end of the last chapter. Voluntarily or involuntarily, sleeping or waking, acting well or ill, we all work together to one end. The Reason administering the whole (here spoken of as a person) will in any case employ you to subserve the whole, as the playwright disposes his lines in the drama. The illustration of the ludicrous line in the play, which Chrysippus the Stoic used to show that evil is the complement of the good and subordinated to it, is referred to by Leibniz[2] in his Théodicée. To this great end the Sun-god and the planets, the Rain-god, Aesculapius, god of healing, and Demeter, who gives the fruits of the earth, all contribute.
Ch. 44. The ordered character of the Universe has been assumed in chs. 42–3. The writer now pauses to ask what ground there is for our belief in Providence. He had touched on this subject at ii. 11. 2 and at vi. 1. He now asks whether the gods take thought for the individual, or whether Epicurus was right to believe in the blessed gods, but not in their care for men.
First, then, assuming they did take counsel for man, they must have counselled for man's good. Evil could not benefit them or the Universe which is their special care.[3] Secondly, if they took no counsel for man, they certainly did for the whole. Man must welcome whatever flows from those high ends by way of consequence.[4] Thirdly, if we suppose they took counsel for nothing, we shall be overthrowing the universal belief of mankind, and all our religious practices will become a farce. (This is an allusion to
