Meditations IX.29
The World-Cause is as a torrent, it sweeps everything along. How negligible these manikins that busy themselves with civic matters and flatter themselves that they act therein as philosophers! Drivellers all! What then, O Man? Do what Nature asks of thee now. Make the effort if it be given thee to do so and look not about to see if any shall know it.46 Dream not of Utopias but be content if the least thing go forward, and count the outcome of the matter in hand as a small thing.47 For who can alter another’s conviction? Failing a change of conviction, we merely get men pretending to be persuaded and chafing like slaves under coercion. Go to now and tell me of Alexander and Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum. Whether they realized the will of Nature and schooled themselves thereto, is their concern. But if they played the tragedy-hero, no one has condemned me to copy them. Simple and modest is the work of Philosophy: lead me not astray into pomposity and pride.
- 46.v. 6, § 1. Seneca’s Epistles 79: Haec nos oportet agere licet nemo videat.
Seneca’s Latin, in translation: “these things we ought to do even though no one sees.”
- 47.Or, reading οὐ μικρόν: deem the success of the matter in hand no small thing.