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 whole a matter of will.--"'Tis in thy power,"
here too, again, "to think as thou wilt." For his part he has
asserted his will, and has the courage of his opinion. "To the
better of two things, if thou findest that, turn with thy whole
heart: eat and drink ever of the best before thee." "Wisdom," says
that other disciple of the Sapiential philosophy, "hath mingled Her
wine, she hath also prepared Herself a table." Tou aristou apolaue:+