The register of an observer. Πολλάκις ἐθαύμασα — "I have often wondered." The passage opens not with an order to oneself but with the statement of an oddity; for the Meditations this is a rare tone — the tone of an observer of manners, nearer to a writer of characters than to a teacher. The imperatives return only in the following entries, 12.6 and after.

The contradiction the whole thing rests on. A man φιλεῖ himself more than anyone — and yet sets his own TERMopinion of himself ἐν ἐλάττονι λόγῳ, "at a lower reckoning," than other people's. The phrase ἐν λόγῳ τίθεσθαι ("to put to account, to value") stands in 3.4 as well, in a kindred use: the good man "does not put to account the praise of such men, who are not even pleasing to themselves." Here the same phrase is turned inward: self-love and self-distrust live together in one man — and he does not see the contradiction.

The test of speaking aloud. The thought-experiment: a god, or a teacher with sense, orders him to think nothing that he would not shout out on the spot — γεγωνίσκων, from γέγωνα, "to call so as to be heard at a distance." The verdict is brief: οὐδὲ πρὸς μίαν ἡμέραν, "he would not last a single day." The same test, taken from the positive end, is set in 3.4: train yourself to entertain only what you could answer μετὰ παρρησίας, without flinching, if someone suddenly asked "what are you thinking now?" There it measures an attainment, here a general failure; the test is one and the same.

The word the conclusion rests on. τοὺς πέλας μᾶλλον αἰδούμεθα … ἢ ἑαυτούς. TERMΑἰδώς is shame-as-reverence, the feeling by which a man reckons with another's gaze; for the Stoics it is a valuable thing, the companion of conscience. Marcus points not at its absence but at its wrong address: it is spent entirely on the neighbours, and none of it is kept for oneself. Hence the practical move he makes elsewhere: if another's gaze weighs so much, look at whose gaze it is — 7.62 ("what ruling parts those men have whose testimony you are after") and 9.18. And hence too the simplest remedy, 4.18: how much leisure a man gains who does not look at what his neighbour said or did at all.

The link with the neighbouring entry. In 12.3 assent was just defined through speech — "saying what is true." Here speech becomes the touchstone of thought: a thought is sound exactly so far as it can be spoken. The governing discipline is assent, the sustaining one desire.