Chapter 130

[←121]

“As there is not any action or natural event, which we are acquainted with, so single and unconnected as not to have a respect to some other actions and events, so possibly each of them, when it has not an immediate, may yet have a remote, natural relation to other actions and events, much beyond the compass of this present world.” Again: “Things seemingly the most insignificant imaginable are perpetually observed to be necessary conditions to other things of the greatest importance, so that any one thing whatever may, for aught we know to the contrary, be a necessary condition to any other.”—Butler’s Analogy, Chap. 7. See all the chapter. Some critics take τὰ ὑπάρχοντα in this passage of Antoninus to be the same as τὰ ὄντα: but if that were so he might have said πρὸς ἄλληλα instead of πρὸς τὰ ὑπάρχοντα. Perhaps the meaning of πρὸς τὰ ὑπάρχοντα may be “to all prior things.” If so, the translation is still correct. See vi. 38.