Still there remains the difficulty that if man can determine his own choice, how can we still speak of Fate as directing the world. The answer is found in the nature of man, whose body is properly directed by his soul. This soul through experience develops reason, and the reasoning soul, as we have already seen, is a part of the universal reason, God. When the reason rules a man’s impulses and directs his will to follow the right course, it leads him into the path of freedom, for freedom consists in the complete subjugation of the impulses to reason. The Stoic had only to appeal to common experience to show that if the body and its impulses prevail, man obviously is a slave; but if reason dominates he is free. As Epictetus taught: “Freedom and slavery, the first is the name of virtue, the other of vice, but both are the effects of choice. Those who do not have the power of choice are touched by neither of these things. But the soul is accustomed to be master of the body, and the things of the body have properly nothing to do with the will to choose; for no man is a slave if he is free in his power to choose.”[230] The perfect philosopher, then, is wholly free, for his every act is guided by reason, and therefore he lives perfectly in accord with Nature and himself. Freedom lies in choice, but the choice once made, the consequences inevitably follow. So the freedom of the individual was reconciled with the rule of a determining Fate. We have thus far seen that Stoicism was a philosophy for the individual; that it demanded that man, being a free agent, recognize his high calling as a reasonable being and put himself by the exercise of his will into accord with Nature and himself, and so attain or at least advance toward perfection. But in contrast to Cynicism Stoicism did not demand that its sectaries should cut themselves off from society; on the contrary it recognized that man is normally a member of a social group. If in its doctrine of personal edification it was strongly individualistic, it was no less cosmopolitan in its social philosophy. Although the earlier Stoics had not taken part in political life—probably because of the conditions of the time,—none had forbidden participation in public affairs, but on the contrary all favored it. Moreover the Stoic could not limit his view to the small political unit or to the society contained therein; but inasmuch as each individual possesses a soul that is a part of the cosmic reason, all mankind is a community of reasoning beings, and every man is a brother of every other.[231] Thus Stoicism gave a philosophic basis to the idea of the brotherhood of man. It taught also that external circumstances, birth, wealth, high position, physical freedom or slavery, are indifferent matters; that the slave if a philosopher is the equal of the philosophic emperor. Such doctrines as these gave a new dignity to the individual and were destined to produce great