Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xx INTRODUCTION SECT.
dark '
philosopher was ranked first among the prophets
of science. As interpretation of phenomena advanced
along the lines which he first opened up, the figures he
had used seemed at each step more pregnant with
suggestion, and the master's authority
is claimed for
applications and affirmations which lay far beyond his
own materialistic horizon. His two cardinal contribu-
tions to physics were, his resolution of mechanical
change into continuous dynamical progress, and, as its
consequent, the idea of an unbroken sequence of succes-
sions, constituting an invariable cosmic march or rhythm
of events, which might be personified as an unalter-
able cosmic will or destiny (St/c^,, Aoyos, eipappevrj), or
generalised into an abstract uniformity of natural law.
He himself persistently interpreted it as the expression
of an ethical order; and his followers, the school of
Ephesus,
antagonists
continued to be the avowed and scornful
of all who remained content with bare
materialistic Sensationism.
The Stoics, largely for this reason, based their physics
upon Heraclitean formulas, and constantly assume his
authority for their own developed conceptions of the
anima mundt, of Pantheistic immanence, of cosmic cycles
of being, 1 and of the periodic conflagration 2 of the world.
Marcus Aurelius himself, perhaps more than any Stoic
writer, exemplifies the tendency to fasten almost super-
stitiously on allegorical intentions in the master's words.
Heraclitus, with bold materialism, had ascribed the totter-
ing gait and reason of the drunkard to the damping effect
of liquor on the inner fire of consciousness, and this is
v. 13, 32 ; vi. 37 ; ix. 28 ; xi. I.
2 iii. 3 ; x. 7.