Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

ii TO HIMSELF 17
vided, putting within man's power
an absolute
immunity. But how can that, which does not
make a man worse, make his life worse ? Nature
could never have made the oversight, either un-
knowingly, or yet knowingly, through inability to
guard against it or set it right. Nature could not,
either through lack of power or lack of skill, have
made such a blunder as to let good
and evil indif-
ferently befall the good and bad indiscriminately.
Yet death and life, good report and evil report,
pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and all such
things fall to the good arid bad indifferently, and
neither ennoble nor demean. The inference is that
they are neither good
nor evil.
By mind-power we apprehend how quickly all 12
things vanish, bodies in the material world, their
memories in the lapse of time ; we understand
the nature of all things of sense, particularly
those which decoy us with the bait of pleasure, or
terrify us with the threat of pain,
or are dinned
into our ears by self-conceit ; how cheap they are
and despicable, filthy, perishable, dead. Intelli-
gence appraises those, whose views and voices
bestow repute ;
it teaches the nature of death,
and shows that any one who looks it fairly in the