The book closes with a disjunction. The end of Book VII is again "providence or atoms," but in a rare, almost theological formulation. The first move is cosmogonic: TERMthe nature of the Whole "set out (ὥρμησε) upon world-making (κοσμοποιία)." The second move is a dilemma about the present moment (νῦν δέ): either everything that happens follows by concatenation (κατ’ ἐπακολούθησιν — "by flowing out" from the first impulse: a single providential order in which every event is a link of the chain begun), or — and this is the second horn — "even the most sovereign things (τὰ κυριώτατα), toward which TERMthe ruling part of the cosmos directs its own TERMimpulse (ἰδίαν ὁρμήν), are without reason (ἀλόγιστα)."

The sharpness of the second horn. The formulation is subtler than the usual "atoms": what is admitted here is not the absence of mind altogether, but the possibility that even where the world's νοῦς tries hardest, the result is unreasoning — that is, either strict providential determinism, or irrationality at the very core. Marcus does not prove the first; he leaves the DOGMAdisjunction open — as in 4.27, 06-10, 7.32, 9.28.

The calming remembrance. The therapeutic clasp of the book: εἰς πολλά σε γαληνότερον ποιήσει τοῦτο μνημονευόμενον — "remembered, this will make you calmer (γαληνότερον) in many things." Why? Because under either picture complaint is senseless: if all is concatenated, there is nothing to resist; if unreason governs, there is no one to blame. A book full of therapies of anger, pain, fame, and death closes with the most general of them: whatever lies at the base of the world, calm is attainable — and is attained by remembrance (μνημονευόμενον), that is, by holding this thought ready to hand. γαλήνη as the last word is no accident: the whole book has led toward the dead calm. The discipline is desire.