Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

in i STOIC DOGMA Ivii
gives that balanced adjustment of being which constitutes
the state of health, be it moral, physical, climatic, or of
any other kind. The Tension doctrine was a philosophic
speculation of considerable acuteness and imaginative
power, derived from the phenomena of expansion and
contraction, especially in their observed connexion with
heat and cold, and is a striking forecast of modes and
activities of being, which in the phenomena of Electricity
and Magnetism and in the properties of Ether have
found scientific realisation, such as at once serves to
confute and to elucidate the postulates of Stoic physics.
In the hands of medical philosophers, investigating the
relation of breath and of vital warmth to life, the theory
became the accepted basis of physiology and scientific
hygiene, and was used to explain the facts of respiration
and circulation, the pathology of fever chills and in-
flammation, the action of blisters and poultices and
cautery, and the every-day phenomena of blushing,
pallor, faintness, and sleep. Inhalations of Pneuma
from the surrounding atmosphere supplied Nous to the
new-born infant, 1 and raised it from merely vegetable to
human potentialities ;
the processes of sense and thought
arose through conduction of Pneuma to brain or heart ;
painful and pleasurable sensation represented movements
of the pneumatic currents running smoothly or roughly 2
in their appointed conduits the ; '
smooth flow ' 3
of
virtue and contentment had its physical counterpart ;
and the function of the arteries, as distinguished from the
1 Cf. vi. 15, 16 ; x. 7.
2 Cf. iv. 3 ; v. 26 ; vii. 55 ; x. 8.
3 Cf. ii. 5 ; iii. 12 ; v. 9, 34; x. 6.