Meditations IX.9

All that share in a common element have an affinity for their own kind. The trend of all that is earthy is to earth; fluids all run together; it is the same with the aerial; so that only interposing obstacles and force can keep them apart. Fire indeed has a tendency to rise by reason of the elemental fire, but is so quick to be kindled in sympathy with all fire here below that every sort of matter, a whit drier than usual, is easily kindled owing to its having fewer constituents calculated to offer resistance to its kindling. So then all that shares in the Universal Intelligent Nature has as strong an affinity towards what is akin, aye even a stronger. For the measure of its superiority to all other things is the measure of its readiness to blend and coalesce with that which is akin to it.

At any rate to begin with among irrational creatures we find swarms and herds and bird-colonies and, as it were, love-associations.²⁰ For already at that stage there are souls, and the bond of affinity shews itself in the higher form to a degree of intensity not found in plants or stones or timber. But among rational creatures are found political communities and friendships and households and gatherings and in wars treaties and armistices. But in things still higher a sort of unity in separation even exists, as in the stars. Thus the ascent to the higher form is able to effect a sympathetic connexion²¹ even among things which are separate.

See then what actually happens at the present time; for at the present time it is only the intelligent creatures that have forgotten their mutual affinity and attraction, and here alone there is no sign of like flowing to like. Yet flee as they will, they are nevertheless caught in the toils, for Nature will have her way. Watch closely and thou wilt see ’tis so. Easier at any rate were it to find an earthy thing in touch with nothing earthy than a man wholly severed from mankind.

• 20.Compare Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound 492: στέργηθρα.

  Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound dramatizes the punishment of Prometheus for giving fire to mankind; in the passage cited he lists the arts he taught men, among them the reading of birds and their stergēthra, “affections.”

• 21.Compare Epictetus’s Discourses i. 14, near the beginning.