It will be remembered that man is for the Stoics a microcosm, who reproduces in his person the constitution of the universe. The entire mass of the world is conceived by them as animated by a divine Fire, a first principle which evokes the succession of natural phenomena. An uninterrupted chain of causes, ordered by this supreme reason, necessarily determines the course of events and irresistibly governs the existence of the great All. This cosmic life is conceived as formed of an infinite series of exactly similar cycles: the four elements are periodically reabsorbed into the purest of their number, which is the Fire of intelligence, and then, after the general conflagration, are once more dissociated. In the same way our organism lives, moves and thinks because it is animated by a detached particle of this fiery principle which penetrates everything. As this principle reaches to the limits of the universe, so our soul occupies the whole body in which it lodges. The pantheism of the Porch conceives as material both God and the reason which rules us, the reason which is, in the emphatic words of Epictetus,[32] “a fragment of God.” It is defined as a hot breath (πνεῦμα πυρῶδες, _anima inflammata_); it is like the purest part of the air which maintains life by respiration, or the ardent ether which feeds the stars. This individual soul maintains and preserves man, as the soul of the world, by connecting its various parts, saves it from disintegration. But on both sides this action is only temporary; souls cannot escape the fatal lot imposed on the whole of which they are but a tiny portion. At the end of each cosmic period the universal conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις) will cause them to return to the divine home whence all of them came forth.[33] But if the new cycle, making its new beginning, is to reproduce exactly that which preceded it, a “palingenesis” will one day give to the same souls, endowed with the same qualities, the same existence in the same bodies formed of the same elements. This is the maximum limit of the immortality which the materialistic pantheism of the Stoic philosophy could concede. Nor did all the doctors agree in granting it. The variations of the school on a point which seems to us of capital importance are most remarkable. While Cleanthes did indeed admit that all souls thus subsisted after their brief passage on earth for thousands of years and until the final _ekpyrosis_, for Chrysippus only the souls of the sages had part in this restricted immortality. In order to win it they must temper their strength by resisting the passions. The weak, who had let themselves be conquered in the struggle of this life, fell in the Beyond also.[34] At the most they obtained a short period of after life. The brevity or the absence of this other existence was the chastisement of their weakness.