ENGLISH COMMENTARY
purely celestial. It belongs to our Christian faith and not to his Stoical virtue to pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis.'[1] As his Meditations progress, the author divests himself of the pride and the austerity towards others, which belonged to the straitest of his sect.
Ch. 13. Counsel, in the spirit of vii. 2, to keep alive the maxim of mutual dependence and membership in one rational system, by the imagination: 'I am a living member of the whole.' He illustrates his point by a little harmless etymology. The Greek word for 'part' contains the canine letter R; the Greek word for 'limb' suggests melody.
What he says of reasonable creatures, locally severed, being related as members of one single organic body, and of an identity of ratio not of equality, is a Stoical tenet which is familiar to us from St. Paul,[2] and which in its widest comprehension is derived from Aristotle.[3]
The beautiful thought 'an act of kindness to yourself' recurs at vii. 74.
Chs. 14–17. Although the argument of ch. 13 gains its chief force from the sympathy which binds the whole body together, Marcus here asserts the independence of the reason, just as he elsewhere asserts that the individual's perfection is his own chief end, that he is not his brother's keeper.[4] The moral self-dependence of chs. 14 and 16 is illustrated by the exquisite imagery of ch. 15.
The second part of ch. 17 follows ch. 16 naturally. The first sentence may originally have followed ch. 15; as it stands in the MS. it is incomplete, just as the text of ch. 16 is deficient and corrupt.
Ch. 17. 'Happiness is a good genius or a good familiar spirit.' We are reminded of Heraclitus' dictum: 'A good character is man's genius.' The etymological pun of the amended text cannot be reproduced in English. The second part of the chapter recalls Epictetus ii. 18. 24.
Chs. 18–21. Reflections upon change and death, the swiftness,
