4. What, then, remained to man after such deductions? There remained the earthly city, the human commonwealth. And when, passing beyond the bounds of any particular nation, and man’s civil position therein, philosophy grasped the moral life as the relation between man as man,(459) and conceived human society itself as one universal kingdom of gods and men, it made a real progress and reached its highest point. But this was the proper merit of the Stoics.(460) Plutarch attributes to Zeno, their founder, this precise idea, that we ought not to live in cities and towns, each divided by peculiar notions of justice, but esteem all men as tribesmen and citizens, who should make up one flock feeding in a common pasture under a common law. The grandest passages of Cicero are those in which he clothes in his Roman diction this stoic idea, as for instance:(461) “They judge the world to be ruled by the power and will of the gods, and to be a sort of city and polity common to gods and men, and that everyone of us is part of this world.” The bond of this community is the common possession of reason,(462) “in which consists the primal society of man with God. But they who have reason in common, have also right reason in common. And as this is law, we are as men to be considered as associated with the gods by law also. Now they who have community of law, have likewise community of rights. This latter makes them also to belong to the same polity. But if such pay obedience to the same commands and authorities, then are they even much more obedient to this supernal allotment, this divine mind and all-powerful God. So that this universal world is to be considered one commonwealth of gods and men.” “Law is the supreme reason, implanted in nature, which commands all things that are to be done, and prohibits their contraries.” “The radical idea of right I derive from nature, under whose guidance we have to draw out the whole of this subject-matter.” Thus the great Roman lawyer and statesman, robing philosophy in his toga, propounded to his countrymen, full of the greed of universal conquest, with no less lucidity than truth and beauty, the result of stoic thought, that human society in general rested on the similarity of reason in the individual, that we have no ground for restricting this common possession to one people, or to consider ourselves more nearly related to one than another. All men, apart from what they have done for themselves, stand equally near to each other, since all equally partake of reason. All are members of one body, since the same nature has formed them out of one stuff, for the same destination.(463)