Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... V.--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus History represents Marcus as discoursing for three days to the assembled Senate--the days preceding his departure for his last campaign--upon the principles of philosophy and the way of virtue; and modern philosophic romance has drawn upon the Thoughts to dramatise the scene in full. While such a resetting is interesting and legitimate, and while it is possible to reproduce with certainty the general colour and contents which such Imperial exhortations must have exhibited, we must not be misled as to the true characters of the Thoughts themselves. These soliloquies were never meant, as some would seem to think, for a set exposition of philosophy; neither are they a homily or treatise intended for edification of readers or the ears of Roman Senators. For adaptation to that purpose something must be put in, and much must be left out. They belong to the privacy of the closet, addressed to no eye or ear but his own --reminiscences, reflections, interrogations, admonitions 'To Himself.' This is the one title that has any vestige of authority, and it were well if they had been always so described and known. They are a manual of personal duty and of self-examination, by which a solitary soul, charged with immense responsibilities, sought to under stand, to discipline, and to confirm itself, and so in the conduct of life to attain a more susceptible appreciation, a more strenuous devotion, a perfected allegiance of will to the leadings of nature and God. Their counterpart has emanated more often from the cell or the hermitage than from the statesman's cabinet or the general's praetorium; they are a De Imitations such as might have been penned amid the isolations of Khartoum. Among philosophers Marcus is neither...