Meditations IV.4
If the intellectual capacity is common to us all, common too is the reason, which makes us rational creatures. If so, that reason also is common which tells us to do or not to do. If so, law14 also is common. If so, we are citizens. If so, we are fellow-members of an organised community. If so, the Universe is as it were a state15—for of what other single polity can the whole race of mankind be said to be fellow-members?—and from it, this common State, we get the intellectual, the rational, and the legal instinct, or whence do we get them? For just as the earthy part has been portioned off for me from some earth, and the watery from another element, and the aerial16 from some source, and the hot and fiery from some source of its own—for nothing comes from the non-existent, any more than it disappears into nothingness—so also the intellect has undoubtedly come from somewhere.
- 14.vii. 9. Compare the Epitome de Caesaribus, attributed to Aurelius Victor, xvi. 4: Mundi lex seu Natura.
The Epitome de Caesaribus is a short anonymous history of the emperors, long attributed to Aurelius Victor. Mundi lex seu Natura: “the law of the world, or Nature.”
- 15.See iv. 3, § 2.
- 16.Literally the pneumatic, here = τὸ ἀερῶδες (x. 7, § 2).
Marcus’s word is pneumatikon, from pneuma, “breath” or “spirit”; to aerōdes, “the airy,” is the term Haines takes it to stand for.