INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 249
reality. He recognizes the influence of environment, and nota- bly that of the alimentary environment.
Here men are of a bizarre and fiery character by reason of the winds of every kind and the excessive heat which prevail in the country that they inhabit. Elsewhere it is the superabundance of water which produces the same effects. In still other places it is the aliments furnished by the soil aliments which affect not only the body, strengthening or enfeebling it, but also the mind, and producing upon it the same consequences. 1
The two schools are not necessarily exclusive. They come together at certain points, but they have this in common with all those who have succeeded them, that neither has reached the conception of society as a combination of the inorganic and organic laws, which in itself carries this double character of environment. The contradictions themselves, when one theory or the other necessarily fails, are the best proof that sociologically man and the environment are only one. With the Stoics the idea of equality and of universal fraternity, parallel to the abolition in fact of the frontiers of small Graeco-Roman cities and the con- stitution of the Graeco-Roman world, is substituted for the con- ception of the antique city. At the same moment appears for the first time the metaphysical notion of the absolute free will of man. From the Stoics this subjective conception passed into the writings of Philo Judaeus. The virtuous man was called free and the vicious man a slave, without taking account of the social and real situation of the citizen or the slave. Social science, or rather its metaphysics, tends to become psychic, moral, and juridic.
The more limits there are among men and among societies, the more frontiers. According to Pseudo-Plutarch, 2 Zeno in his Treatise upon Government proposes to show us that we do not belong to such and such a tribe or city, separated from each other by a definite right and by exclusive laws, but that we ought to see in all men fellow-citizens, as if all belonged to the same tribe in the same city. Marcus Aurelius said : "As Antoninus, I have Rome for country; as man, the world." Epictetus, speaking of slaves, wrote: "You should remember
I Laws, Book V. * Fortune of Alexander, Book I.
