a being so variously compounded?  It is a question much debated.  Some read his history in a certain intricacy of nerve and the success of successive digestions; others find him an exiled piece of heaven blown upon and determined by the breath of God; and both schools of theorists will scream like scalded children at a word of doubt.  Yet either of these views, however plausible, is beside the question; either may be right; and I care not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a more immediate point.  What is the man?  There is Something that was before hunger and that remains behind after a meal.  It may or may not be engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it changes, heightens, and sanctifies.  Thus it is not engaged in lust, where satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love, where no satisfaction can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age, sickness, or alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing the sentiment.  This something, which is the man, is a permanence which abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress of appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all.  So, to the man, his own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult of the senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night.  It is forgotten; it is hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall behold himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.

Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats, that generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides of man.  This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured and shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his conduct, is something special to himself and not common to the race.  His joys delight, his sorrows wound him, according as this is interested or indifferent in the affair; according as they arise in an imperial war or in a broil conducted by the tributary chieftains of the mind.  He may lose all, and this not suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle, and this leap in his bosom with a cruel pang.  I do not speak of it to hardened theorists:  the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.

’Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as it were, pull thee by the strings.  What is that now in thy mind? is it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?’ Thus far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any book.  Here is a question worthy to be answered.  What is in thy mind?  What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard intelligibly?  It is something beyond the compass of your thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not of a higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect