Marcus Aurelius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The properties of the rational soul: it sees itself, it articulates itself, it makes itself whatever it wishes to be, it reaps the fruit it bears itself (whereas the fruits of plants, and the corresponding thing in animals, are reaped by others), it attains its own end wherever the limit of life is set upon it, unlike dancing or acting or the like, where the whole performance is left incomplete if something cuts it off - no, at every part, and wherever it may be overtaken, it renders what was set before it full and lacking nothing of itself, so that it can say: I have what is mine. Further, it ranges over the entire cosmos, the emptiness that surrounds it, and its form, and stretches out into the endlessness of time, and grasps and revolves in thought the cyclical renewal of all things, and sees that those who come after us will see nothing new, nor did those before us see anything more, but that in a way the man of forty, if he has any understanding at all, has seen all that has been and all that will be, by virtue of their likeness in kind. It is also a property of the rational soul to love one's neighbors, and truthfulness, and reverence, and to honor nothing above itself - which is also a property of law; and so it turns out that right reason and the reason of justice are no different from each other.