having determined powers productive of beings and of changes and of such
like successions (vii. 75).

[A] "As there is not any action or natural event, which we are
acquainted with, so single and unconnected as not to have a
respect to some other actions and events, so possibly each of
them, when it has not an immediate, may yet have a remote,
natural relation to other actions and events, much beyond the
compass of this present world." Again: "Things seemingly the
most insignificant imaginable are perpetually observed to be
necessary conditions to other things of the greatest
importance, so that any one thing whatever may, for aught we
know to the contrary, be a necessary condition to any
other."--Butler's Analogy, Chap. 7. See all the chapter. Some
critics take [Greek: ta hyparchonta] in this passage of
Antoninus to be the same as [Greek: ta honta]: but if that were
so he might have said [Greek: pros allela] instead of [Greek:
pros ta hyparchonta]. Perhaps the meaning of [Greek: pros ta
hyparchonta] may be "to all prior things." If so, the
translation is still correct. See vi. 38.

2. It would be a man's happiest lot to depart from mankind without
having had any taste of lying and hypocrisy and luxury and pride.
However, to breathe out one's life when a man has had enough of these
things is the next best voyage, as the saying is. Hast thou determined
to abide with vice, and hast not experience yet induced thee to fly from
this pestilence? For the destruction of the understanding is a
pestilence, much more, indeed, than any such corruption and change of
this atmosphere which surrounds us. For this corruption is a pestilence
of animals so far as they are animals; but the other is a pestilence of
men so far as they are men.

3. Do not despise death, but be well content with it, since this too is
one of those things which nature wills. For such as it is to be young
and to grow old, and to increase and to reach maturity, and to have
teeth and beard and gray hairs, and to beget and to be pregnant and to
bring forth, and all the other natural operations which the seasons of
thy life bring, such also is dissolution. This, then, is consistent with
the character of a reflecting man--to be neither careless nor impatient
nor contemptuous with respect to death, but to wait for it as one of the
operations of nature. As thou now waitest for the time when the chi