ignificance in the
making of such conversation with one's self at all. The Logos, the
reasonable spark, in man, is common to him with the gods--koinos auto
pros tous theous+--cum diis communis. That might seem but the truism
of a certain school of philosophy; but in Aurelius was clearly an
original and lively apprehension. There could be no inward
conversation with one's self such as this, unless there were indeed
some one else, aware of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or
displeased at [48] one's disposition of one's self. Cornelius Fronto
too could enounce that theory of the reasonable community between men
and God, in many different ways. But then, he was a cheerful man, and
Aurelius a singularly sad one; and what to Fronto was but a doctrine,
or a motive of mere rhetoric, was to the other a consolation. He walks
and talks, for a spiritual refreshment lacking which he would faint by
the way, with what to the learned professor is but matter of
philosophic eloquence.

In performing his public religious functions Marcus Aurelius had ever
seemed like one who took part in some great process, a great thing
really done, with more than the actually visible assistants about him.
Here, in these manuscripts, in a hundred marginal flowers of thought or
language, in happy new phrases of his own like the impromptus of an
actual conversation, in quotations from other older masters of the
inward life, taking new significance from the chances of such
intercourse, was the record of his communion with that eternal reason,
which was also his own proper self, with the divine companion, whose
tabernacle was in the intelligence of men--the journal of his daily
commerce with that.

Chance: or Providence! Chance: or Wisdom, one with nature and man,
reaching from end to end, through all time and all existence, orderly
disposing all things, according to [49] fixed periods, as he describes
it, in terms very like certain well-known words of the book of
Wisdom:--those are the "fenced opposites" of the speculative dilemma,
the tragic embarras, of which Aurelius cannot too often remind himself
as the summary of man's situation in the world. If there be, however,
a provident soul like this "behind the veil," truly, even to him, even
in the most intimate of those conversations, it has never yet spoken
with any quite irresistible assertion of its presence. Yet one's
choice in that speculative dilemma, as he has found it, is on the