As little did it attempt to account for or to correct the conflict between man’s reason and his animal nature. That perpetual approval of the better and choice of the worse part stood before the Stoic as before us all. He admitted that the vast majority of men were bad, and his wise man was an ideal never reached. But he had no answer whatever to the question, why, if vice is so evil in the eye of our reason, it so clings to our nature; why, if so contrary to the good of the mass, it dwells within every individual.(467) The human city or community of men is the highest point which this moral philosophy contemplates. Each particular commonwealth should be herein the image of the one universal commonwealth which their thought had constructed. But what, then, is the relation of the individual man to the whole of which he is a part? This nature, which is the standard to the whole ideal commonwealth, is, as we have seen so often, in fact a law of the strictest necessity. If virtuous, man follows it willingly; if vicious, he must follow it against his will. There was no real freedom for the individual in the system as philosophy. What was disguised under the name of law, reason, and God, was a relentless necessity before which everyone was to bow. But transfer this philosophy to any political community, and consider in what position it placed the individual with regard to the civil government. Human society is considered as supreme: but his own state represents to him that society, and as all things end with this life, no part of man remains withdrawn from that despotism which requires the sacrifice of the part for the good of the whole. Man’s conscience had no refuge in the thought of a future life; no reserve which the abuse of human power could not touch. And so we find that in matter of fact there was no issue out of such a difficulty but in the doctrine of self-destruction. They termed it in truth _The Issue_,(468) when disease, or disaster, or pain, or the abuse of human power, rendered it impossible any longer to lead a life in accordance with nature. In this case all the Stoic authorities justified it, praised it, and termed it the Door which divine Providence had benignantly left ever open.