Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

v MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS cix
awaiting new activities or the complete reintegration
which takes place at the final conflagration of the present
order. The denial of the 'hope of immortality' is A
settled and complete ; there is no place in the Thoughts \
for the rhetorical ambiguities of Seneca ;
and for Marcus
as indubitably as for Epictetus 'there is no work nor /
device nor wisdom nor knowledge in the grave whither /
thou goest.'
This digression, if rather minute,
will have served
to illustrate the right method of studying the Thoughts,
if we desire to get at the mind of Marcus and his
exact relation to Stoic doctrine. The quality of treat-
ment is of a piece with the conditions and character of
The ethical value of the work does not
workmanship.
rest on exactness or originality of speculative thought.
Receptiveness, not originality, was the note of his own
genius, as well as of the age and society in which he
lived. For true self-realisation and that satisfaction of
the energies which alone brings happiness, the problems
of physics and metaphysics seemed almost as empty and
unprofitable
as the exercises in rhetoric from which
he had turned impatiently when manhood was mature. 1
The life of Reason was more than logic, and not the
monopoly of schoolmen.
' Do not,' he writes, '
because
dialectic and physics lie beyond your ken, despair on
that account of freedom, self-respect, unselfishness, and
tractability toward 2
God.' Stoic physics and logic are
not to Marcus an arena for argument or speculation, but
accepted presuppositions
needed to make life coherent
1 i. 7 and close of 17 ; viii. I.
2 vii. 67.