Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

Ixxii- INTRODUCTION SECT.
Pneuma within and cognate manifestations of Pneuma
without ; the act of consciousness is referred to the
interior soul, the sense-organs only providing instruments
of communication. The pleasures of sense, just as
those of reason in its own department, are due to the
smooth or rough flow of the Pneuma-currents l in the
channels appropriated to their action, though Reason
and Will have power to ignore such excitations at their
pleasure. In a lower order still, and served by other
organs, comes the generative or reproductive faculty)
and (without much clearness or coherence of view) the
faculty of speech. 2
Throughout, the materiality of the
soul is unflinchingly affirmed, and nowhere more un-
reservedly so (in spite
of some incidental laxities of
expression) than in Marcus, who, following the medical
theorisers of his day, describes the soul as an exhalation
of the blood. 3 Death similarly is the 'evaporation' 4 of
the immanent Pneuma from the physical organism, prior
to its extinction or re-immergence in the world-Pneuma.
The object of these laboured and somewhat barren
speculations is plain, namely, the determination to main-
1
See p. Ivii.
2 This classification seems referred to in xii. 31.
3
avadvfjdaffis d0' cu'yuaros, v. 33 ; vi. 15. The principle of
evaporation (dva6v/j.ia(ris) plays a large part in the speculations of
the Ionian physicists. To Heraclitus, soul is an exhalation from
air, and Cleanthes regards the sun, the Hegemonikon of the World,
as recruited by exhalation from the sea. The transition from liquid
to gaseous is the normal assumption ; but the explicit pathological
association with the blood, as vehicle of vital warmth, was worked
out by Diogenes of Apollonia and the medical school. In Marcus
it possibly reflects the personal teaching of Galen,
vi. 4.