Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

v MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS cxi
application
of the idea of the cosmos. This makes
itself felt in more than one direction ; in duties to others
the cosmic claim tends to absorb and supersede individual
virtue and even social fellowship ; in duties to self, the
immanence of the indwelling God, while conceived
more impersonally, becomes more vivid and imperious
in operation ; in physics, especially in the physiology of
mind and spirit and in cosmic *
sympathy of parts,' surer
foundations are provided for pantheistic reverence and
belief.
The other and more obvious differences that separate
them are the result of position and of temperament.
As a professed teacher, Epictetus was called upon to
examine and weigh grounds of evidence and modes of
proof, to accept or reject criteria, to formulate bases of
belief, to confront and criticise the tenets of friendly or
hostile schools ; he addresses himself to all sorts and
conditions of men, the man of the study, the man of
the market-place, and the man of the bureau; to
philosophers and laymen, to prudes and profligates,
misers and spendthrifts, to the privileged and the
oppressed, to representatives of every class and age and
station in life, from the patrician or proconsul to the
freedman and the slave. For the moralist he classifies
virtues and vices, tracks their affinities and exposes their
disguises ; for the crowd, he deals with the round of
daily life, its faults, its foibles and its vicissitudes ; he
has shrewd counsels for the quarrelsome, the talkative or
the affected ; he holds up the mirror to indolence,
hypocrisy, or stubbornness ;
he discourses upon manners
no less than morals, discussing the ethics of dress, of