Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

xlvi INTRODUCTION SECT.
gradually realised. Its deeper implications such, for
instance, as the religious significance of pantheistic
immanence, the introduction of moral emotion and
moral sesthesis into the sphere of natural religion, the
ascription of evidential value and meaning to its intuitions,
the full recognition of 'the social moment/ and
the conception of world-citizenship
unfolded themselves
through life even more than through thought, and find
their fullest exposition in the pages of the Roman Stoics.
'
Return to nature,' so far from implying reversion to
animalism, and the reduction of man's needs to the level
of the beasts, was found to involve fundamental differ-
entiation of reasoning man from the unreason of the
brute or the inertia of matter, to place man on a unique
spiritual plane, and eventually to summon him from
individual isolation to conscious brotherhood with kind
and harmony of will with God. These are the elements
of Stoicism which have proved most permanent and
universal.
One of the first effects of the reinstatement of reason
in its '
natural '
place was to reintroduce the whole order
of 'things indifferent' to the purview of morals. So
long as virtue was solely right condition and exercise of
will, acting upon the intimations of instinct and sense,
no alternative was possible but absolute acceptance or
rejection; no intermediate course, no parleying or
suspension of decision, could be allowed without ad-
mitting the fallibility, and surrendering the independent
autocracy of the moral organ. But with the appearance
of reason on the scene, with its power of discrimination,
of valuation, and, above all, of '
suspense,' the position