He remarks "a peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of society. Men are regarded and treated not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as a citizen, he is a member of his order—of an aristocracy or a democracy, of an order of patricians or plebeians; or in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste; next he is member of a gens, house, or clan; and lastly he is member of his _family_. This last was the narrowest and most personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was he ever regarded as _himself_, as a distinct individual. His individuality was swallowed up in his family. I repeat the definition of a primitive society given before. It has for its units not individuals, but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of blood-relationship" (p. 183). "The history of jurisprudence must be followed in its whole course, if we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved itself into the component atoms of which it is now constituted; by what insensible gradations the relation of man to man substituted itself for the relation of the individual to his family, and of families to each other" (p. 185). Such is the strong—may we not say irrefragable?—testimony which the condition of human society, as it emerges into the light of history, bears to the family as the cradle of man's life. It is in the original soil of the family that the four goods we have noted, marriage, religion, government, and the alliance between religion and government, spring up together. Further, also, they are seen to be not separate, one here and another there, but bound together in the strictest coherence. For if this human race be thrown up and down throughout the world, divided and insulated in its several parts by vast distances and by thousands of years, even the scattered limbs are shaped in the mould stamped upon it at its birth, and in them government, law, property in its origin and its succession, and religion bear witness to the family character. This archaic society, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, from Scythia in the north to India in the south, is never a crowd of individuals but an organic structure: Adam and Eve prolonged and living in their race. We see that in the beginning the fathership of God created a human plant which should reveal Himself in its development, bearing in its structure and fruit an undying witness to His nature; and serving, in spite of corruption and decline, for the future exhibition of His fathership in a yet higher degree, even to the communication of the divine nature.