Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

in 2 STOIC DOGMA Ixvii
Lead me, O Zeus, and lead me, Destiny,
What way soe'er ye have appointed me !
I follow unafraid ; yea though the will
Turn recreant, I needs must follow still.
CLEANTHES ap. EPICTETUM, Encheiridion.
As a further consequence of this, the declared com-
munity of mind between the cosmos and man, and
the perception of a single purpose uniting both in
common ends, produced a sympathetic sentiment
towards nature, unknown before except as some vague,
instinctive presage, unauthorised and unexplained. But
when nature stood revealed as a sentient being, pulsing
and interpenetrated everywhere with the same stream of
life as fed man's own, the pathetic fallacy
found stand-
ing-ground in fact, and became, alike in ethics and in
poetry, a new source of imaginative appeal, that, from
Cleanthes to Shelley, from Vergil to Wordsworth, has
expatiated in the enlarging fervours of the poetry of
pantheism.
No system of material monism will permanently
satisfy man's intellectual constitution ; it is meta-
physically shallow, and fails to meet the necessities or
account for the existence of thought ; but the Stoic at-
tempt, noble, far-reaching, and on its own lines exhaustive,
not merely held for centuries a more active and com-
manding sway over the minds and hearts of men than the
metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, not merely interwove
itself with Christian discipline and doctrine, and found
philosophic reconstruction in Spinoza, but at this day,
alike in the poetic and scientific imagination, enjoys a
wider currency, and exercises a more invigorative appeal