The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius - College of Stoic Philosophers

48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTONINUS
will be, he might be supposed to say what some of the
Indian philosophers have said, and thus a profound truth
might be converted into a gross absurdity. But he says,
in a manner, and in a manner he said true ;
and in
he said false.
another manner, if you mistake his meaning,
When Plato said, Nothing ever is, but is
always becoming
(del Yifyverai), he delivered a text, out of which we may
derive something; for he destroys by it not all practical,
notions of cause and effect. The whole
but all speculative
series of things, as they appear to us, must be con
templated in time, that is in succession, and we conceive
or suppose intervals between one state of things and
another state of things, so that there is priority and
sequence, and interval, and Being, and a ceasing to
Be, and beginning and ending. But there is
nothing of
the kind in the Nature of Things. It is an everlasting
continuity (iv, 45 ; vir, 75). When Antoninus speaks of
generation (x, 26), he speaks of one cause (atria) acting,
and then another cause taking up the work, which the
former left in a certain state and so on ;
and we might
perhaps conceive that he had some notion like what has
been called the self-evolving power of nature ;
a fine
phrase indeed, the full
import of which I believe that the
writer of it did not see, and thus he laid himself open to
the imputation of being a follower of one of the Hindu
sects, which makes all things come by evolution out of
nature or matter, or out of something which takes the
place of deity, but is not deity. I would have all men
think as they please, or as they can, and I only claim the
same freedom which I give. When a man writes anything,
we may fairly try to find out all that his words must mean,
even if the result is that they mean what he did not mean ;
and if we find this contradiction, it is not our fault, but his
misfortune. Now Antoninus is
perhaps somewhat in this
condition in what he says (x, 26), though he speaks at the
end of the paragraph of the power which acts, unseen by