The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius - College of Stoic Philosophers

56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTONINUS
government of God conclude too hastily. We all admit
that there is an order in the material world, a Nature,
in the sense in which that word has been explained, a
constitution (/caTaoveeu?;), what we call a system, a relation
of parts
to one another and a fitness of the whole for
something. So in the constitution of plants and of
animals there is an order, a fitness for some end. Some
times the order, as we conceive it, is interrupted, and the
end, as we conceive it, is not attained. The seed, the
plant or the animal sometimes perishes
before it has
passed through all its changes and done all its uses. It
is
according to Nature, that is a fixed order, for some to
perish early and for others to do all their uses and leave
successors to take their place. So man has a corporeal
and intellectual and moral constitution fit for certain uses,
and on the whole man performs these uses, dies and
leaves other men in his place. So society exists, and a
social state is manifestly the Natural State of man, the
state for which his Nature fits him ;
and society amidst
innumerable irregularities and disorders still subsists ; and
and our
perhaps we may say that the history of the past
present knowledge give us a reasonable hope that its
disorders will diminish, and that order, its governing
principle, may be more firmly established. As order then,
a fixed order, we may say, subject to deviations real or
must be admitted to exist in the whole Nature
apparent,
of things, that which we call disorder or evil as it seems
to us, does not in any way alter the fact of the general
constitution of things having a Nature or fixed order.
Nobody will conclude from the existence of disorder that
order is not the rule, for the existence of order both
physical and moral is
proved by daily experience and all
past experience. We cannot conceive how the order of
the universe is maintained : we cannot even conceive
how our own life from day to day is continued, nor how
we perform the simplest movements of the body, nor