Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

v MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS cv
and each abstinence, each word and each silence, 1 each
gesture and each look, 2 was a conscious and diligent
observance of Stoic precept, till the tenets of the masters,
so learned and practised and appropriated, became a
second nature, prescribing not merely instinctive canons
of behaviour, but even the inevitable moulds of thought
and of expression.
Of most of the censures levelled at his inaccuracy it
may be said, either that the language is to be judged by
common sense and not intended to be technical, or that
the term or tenet assailed is a genuine ingredient of
Stoicism in its Graeco-Roman form. His theory 3 of
knowledge, impulse, and perception
is in close accord
with that of Epictetus ; his attribution of non-reasoning
'
Soul '
to animals is express and deliberate 4 ;
to Atomism, or to the '
future state '
of the Soul,
his attitude
is sound
and coherent. The latter is a good typical instance for
examination.
Depending as it necessarily
did on distant and in-
secure hypotheses, and leaving ethical issues unaffected,
the doctrine does not bulk largely in Stoic discussion.
Death, a re-arrangement or dispersion of the bodily
elements, could not imply annihilation of the Pneuma,
a thing logically and physically inadmissible, but only
cessation of the particular form of immanence. That
after death the animating soul or pneuma was sooner or
later re-assimilated into the stock of universal soul, all
Stoics were agreed; but while some held that death
connoted the end of separable existence, others thought
1
i. 10 ; vi. 53 vii. ; 4, 30.
3 Cf. Section in. 4.
2 vii. 24, 37, 60
4 So vi. 14 ; ix. 8, 9.