Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

Ixvi INTRODUCTION SECT.
Hence, for the first time in Greek thought, there
emerges the idea of duty and of the sense of sin, inde-
pendent of inner impulses or of human obligation or
relationship. Nature, immanent as thought, looks down
forbiddingly upon the motions of sense, impulsive and
precipitate ; and looks up with guiding and sympathetic
reverence to that cosmos of which it is part. Assuming
the role of a constraining power, that as whole to
part
can overrule the action of the individual to the
purposes of the world-order,
it erects an outer deter-
minism, beside which man's freedom resolves itself
into capacity for conscious co-operation with a power
that exceeds and comprehends his own. Man, like
the olive, but with consciousness superadded, spends
his brief moment according to nature's law, and '
falls
when it is ripe.' 1 Thus Stoic freewill becomes a
selective power 2 of inner self-determination, by which
reason or moral will is able to accept or to resist
the reactions of sense and impulse and circumstance
upon inner disposition. Passive obedience may become
active. In the sweep of the great cosmic
current, Will can for its season keep personality intact,
and may consciously realise and accept the trend
of destiny; but its action is circumscribed to itself;
it cannot shape events, or move or modify things
a hair's breadth the course of
without, or vary by
Necessity. It becomes devout and almost fatalistic
resignation
1 iv. 48.
2 In the terms of Epictetus a x/ ) ?7< rts (f>wra-