Meditations X.33
Taking our ‘material’ into account, what can be said or done in the soundest way? Be it what it may, it rests with thee to do or say it. And let us have no pretence that thou art being hindered.
Never shalt thou cease murmuring until it be so with thee that the utilizing, in a manner consistent with the constitution of man, of the material presented to thee and cast in thy way shall be to thee what indulgence is to the sensual. For everything must be accounted enjoyment that it is in a man’s power to put into practice in accordance with his own nature; and it is everywhere in his power.
A cylinder we know has no power given it of individual motion everywhere, nor has fire or water or any other thing controlled by Nature or by an irrational soul. For the interposing and impeding obstacles are many. But Intelligence and Reason make their way through every impediment just as their nature or their will prompts them. Setting before thine eyes this ease wherewith the Reason can force its way through every obstacle, as fire upwards, as a stone downwards, as a cylinder down a slope,54 look for nothing beyond. For other hindrances either concern that veritable corpse, the body,55 or, apart from imagination and the surrender of Reason herself, cannot crush us or work any harm at all.56 Else indeed would their victim at once become bad.
In fact in the case of all other organisms, if any evil happen to any of them, the victim itself becomes the worse for it. But a man so circumstanced becomes, if I may so say, better and more praiseworthy by putting such contingencies to a right use.57 In fine, remember that nothing that harms not the city can harm him whom Nature has made a citizen58; nor yet does that harm a city which harms not law. But not one of the so-called mischances harms law. What does not harm law, then, does no harm to citizen or city.
- 54.Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights vi. 2, § 11 (from Chrysippus).
Aulus Gellius reports Chrysippus’s image of a cylinder, which must be pushed to start moving but then rolls according to its own shape, used to reconcile fate with human responsibility.
- 55.See iv. 41.
- 56.See iv. 7.
- 57.See vii. 58.
- 58.See x. 6.