Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/89

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 73

pletely disappeared, or at least were about to vanish. But, in spite of the increasing equality of purely civic and political con- ditions, under the leveling influence of the same imperial system, the real limits between classes and interests had perhaps never been more pronounced. Nor had the social organization been more highly differentiated, and hence necessarily limited in each of its functions by coexistent institutions and forms. And every- where, from the stage of simple associations, corporations of laborers, up to the formation of powerful commercial and finan- cial societies and of various colleges, religious, political, and others, the whole internal social structure was in the aggregate firmly closed and organized in elaborate gradations. Only the torpid feudal and Catholic Middle Age, and then the later con- stitution of absolute monarchies, could suffice to bring attention back to the stern reality, the appreciation of which Stoicism and then primitive Christianity had lost, while their moral ideal, although high, was fatally lacking in positive content.

Already with Diogenes, when the Greek city was founded in the empire of Alexander, the school of the Cynics had ignored patriotism. The Epicureans were also uninterested in public affairs. Man was to them a citizen of the universe. He did not cast his lot with any definite social group. Diogenes boasted of having no rights of citizenship. Crates extended this cosmo- politan individualism to every community, even that of thought. His country was in the contempt of the vulgar human mass. The super-man is not an invention of our century. The theory is formulated especially in the Stoic philosophy, which thus became a philosophy or general conception of the social world. Man supplants the citizen. Seneca, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Zeno, have for their country the world. All men, including slaves, descend from the same god, all are brothers, according to Epic- tetus. !tt was a general mollifying of the ancient law of the classes. Christianity was the product of this dissolution of ancient institutions and beliefs. It was communistic, and in this sense it represents a remarkable effort to articulate the new moral and social conception with a superior economic law. But its fra- ternal idealism presently clothed itself with an authoritative form