Meditations IX.28
The same, upwards, downwards,41 from cycle to cycle are the revolutions of the Universe. And either the Universal Mind feels an impulse to act in each separate case—and if this be so, accept its impulsion—or it felt this impulse42 once for all, and all subsequent things follow by way of consequence; and what matters which it be, for if you like to put it so the world is all atoms [or indivisible].43 But as to the Whole, if God—all is well; if haphazard—be not thou also haphazard.44
Presently the earth will cover us all. It too will anon be changed, and the resulting product will go on from change to change, and so for ever and ever. When a man thinks of these successive waves of change and transformation, and their rapidity, he will hold every mortal thing in scorn.45
- 41.The Heraclitan round of change between the elements; see iv. 46.
The Heraclitean doctrine is that the elements change continually into one another, as in his saying that “the way up and the way down are one and the same.”
- 42.See ix. 1, § 4.
- 43.Possibly ἀμερῆ is a gloss, or ὁμοιομερῆ should be read. (Compare Epictetus’s Fragments 175.)
Amerē, “without parts”; homoiomerē, “made of like parts,” the term used of the elements in the physics of Anaxagoras.
- 44.ii. 5; iv. 2, etc. τὸ ὅλον may also be taken to mean in fine.
- 45.ix. 19; xii. 21. Compare Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus xxviii. 4 of Marcus on his death-bed: ridens res humanas.
Capitolinus’s ridens res humanas: “laughing at human affairs.”