Note 106 — Chapter XII · APPLIED MORAL SCIENCE.

In their recognition of the universal rights of mankind the Stoics did not go so far as to disapprove of slavery. Attaching in general little value to external circumstances,106 they cared the less to throw down the gauntlet to the social institutions and arrangements of their time. Still, they could not wholly suppress a confession that slavery is unjust,107 nor cease to aim at mitigating the evil both in theory and practice.108 If all men are, as rational beings, equal, all men together form one community. Reason is the common law for all, and those who owe allegiance to one law are members of one state.109 If the Stoics, therefore, compared the world, in its more extended sense, to a society, because of the connection of its parts,110 they must, with far more reason, have allowed that the world, in the narrower sense of the term, including all rational beings, forms one community,111 to which individual communities are related, as the houses of a city are to the city collectively.112 Wise men, at least, if not others, will esteem this great community, to which all men belong, far above any particular community in which the accident of birth has placed them.113 They, at least, will direct their efforts towards making all men feel themselves to be citizens of one community; and, instead of framing exclusive laws and constitutions, will try to live as one family, under the common governance of reason.114 The platform of social propriety receives hereby a universal width. Man, by withdrawing from the outer world into the recesses of his own intellectual and moral state, becomes enabled to recognise everywhere the same nature as his own, and to feel himself one with the universe, by sharing with it the same nature and the same destiny.