and a man might be well content to get out of it.  He has doubts perhaps sometimes even about that to which he holds most firmly.  There are only a few passages of this kind, but they are evidence of the struggles which even the noblest of the sons of men had to maintain against the hard realities of his daily life.  A poor remark it is which I have seen somewhere, and made in a disparaging way, that the emperor’s reflections show that he had need of consolation and comfort in life, and even to prepare him to meet his death.  True that he did need comfort and support, and we see how he found it.  He constantly recurs to his fundamental principle that the universe is wisely ordered, that every man is a part of it and must conform to that order which he cannot change, that whatever the Deity has done is good, that all mankind are a man’s brethren, that he must love and cherish them and try to make them better, even those who would do him harm.  This is his conclusion (ii. 17):  “What then is that which is able to conduct a man?  One thing and only one, Philosophy.  But this consists in keeping the divinity within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man’s doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and finally waiting for death with a cheerful mind as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded.  But if there is no harm, to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements [himself]? for it is according to nature; and nothing is evil that is according to nature.”

The Physic of Antoninus is the knowledge of the Nature of the Universe, of its government, and of the relation of man’s nature to both.  He names the universe ([Greek:  he ton hylon ousia], vi. 1),[A] “the universal substance,” and he adds that “reason” ([Greek:  logos]) governs the universe.  He also (vi. 9) uses the terms “universal nature” or “nature of the universe.”  He (vi. 25) calls the universe “the one and all, which we name Cosmos or Order” ([Greek:  kosmos]).  If he ever seems to use these general terms as significant of the All, of all that man can in any way conceive to exist, he still on other occasions plainly distinguishes between Matter, Material things ([Greek:  hyle, hylikon]), and Cause, Origin, Reason ([Greek:  aitia, aitiodes, logos]).[B] This is conformable to Zeno’s doctrine that there are two original principles ([Greek:  archai]) of all things, that which acts ([Greek:  to poioun]) and that which is acted upon ([Greek:  to paschon]).  That which is acted on is the formless matter ([Greek:  hyle]):  that which acts is the reason ([Greek:  logos]),