f 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 notab