Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

v MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS cxxxiii
against itself, and the parts warring against each other
are brought to moral impotence. Suppression of the
emotions is destruction, not conservation or adjustment
of energy, and so far as it takes effect involves waste,
or even self- expenditure, of the one source of motive
power. Good order and contentment in the soul are
based on long-suffering, inexorable coercion of all un-
satisfied affections, with sure sapping of the moral
energies.
'
Apathy,' on this showing, becomes a passion-
less heroism in which moral responsibility declines into
fatalistic acquiescence, and the independence and being
of the self are finally annulled. Not only ignoble and
selfish emotions are to be suppressed, but also the
most ennobling and energetic, all that aspire beyond
the present, all that do well to be angry in resisting
antagonism to wrong, all that kindle duty into desire
and suffuse it with emotional warmth. 'Teach men
or bear with them,' '
Blame none '
become aphorisms of
the virtue, which moves only within the prescriptions of
the individual reason. Disabled for inspiration or for
reproach,
it becomes an anxious exercise of self- con-
straint, patient, restricted, and ineffectual. Hence the
deep individual pessimism which appears side by side
with the pantheistic optimism, and which so broadly
distinguishes the Stoic and the Christian doctrines of
resignation. The universal optimism of the Stoic allows
and even rests on pessimism in the particulars ; the part
is of necessity the whole in a form of incomplete and like-
wise imperfect realisation ;
its interest and its existence is
subordinate to the well-being of the whole, and its transi-
ence and insignificance become topics of consolation.