est is consistent with man's nature, and love this to
which thou returnest; and do not return to philosophy as if she were a
master, but act like those who have sore eyes and apply a bit of sponge
and egg, or as another applies a plaster, or drenching with water. For
thus thou wilt not fail to + obey reason, and thou wilt repose in it.
And remember that philosophy requires only things which thy nature
requires; but thou wouldst have something else which is not according to
nature.--It may be objected, Why, what is more agreeable than this
[which I am doing]? But is not this the very reason why pleasure
deceives us? And consider if magnanimity, freedom, simplicity,
equanimity, piety, are not more agreeable. For what is more agreeable
than wisdom itself, when thou thinkest of the security and the happy
course of all things which depend on the faculty of understanding and
knowledge?

10. Things are in such a kind of envelopment that they have seemed to
philosophers, not a few nor those common philosophers, altogether
unintelligible; nay even to the Stoics themselves they seem difficult to
understand. And all our assent is changeable; for where is the man who
never changes? Carry thy thoughts then to the objects themselves, and
consider how short-lived they are and worthless, and that they may be in
the possession of a filthy wretch or a whore or a robber. Then turn to
the morals of those who live with thee, and it is hardly possible to
endure even the most agreeable of them, to say nothing of a man being
hardly able to endure himself. In such darkness then and dirt, and in so
constant a flux both of substance and of time, and of motion and of
things moved, what there is worth being highly prized, or even an object
of serious pursuit, I cannot imagine. But on the contrary it is a man's
duty to comfort himself, and to wait for the natural dissolution, and
not to be vexed at the delay, but to rest in these principles only: the
one, that nothing will happen to me which is not conformable to the
nature of the universe; and the other, that it is in my power never to
act contrary to my god and daemon: for there is no man who will compel
me to this.

11. About what am I now employing my own soul? On every occasion I must
ask myself this question, and inquire, What have I now in this part of
me which they call the ruling principle? and whose soul have I
now,--that of a child, or of a young man, or of a feeble woman, or of a
tyran