a child.”9 The idea of a global republic is combined with the metaphor of the particular nation


as a human subject – or rather, in this case, a collective subject, a family. “Personification of the state”, write the authors of Organising European Space (2003), “is a basic metaphor, which guides our thinking about international relations”.10 Each individual is regarded as a child of the national family. Thus, there seem only to be three levels when moving from the local to the global: the individual, the collective, and the universal collective. Ramsay goes on to say that it “was to revive and re-animate such maxims” (continuing with “borrowed from nature” in the version Lamoines translated in AQC) that freemasonry was established.The goal is to unite menof an enlightened mind so that


“the interest of the Fraternity might become that of the whole human race; where all nations might


increase all knowledge; and where every subject of every country might exert himself without jealousy, live without discord, end embrace mutually, without forgetting, or too scrupulously remembering the spot he was born.”11


According to Ramsay the maxims of philanthropic cosmopolitanism are based upon


“nature” (a typical figure in the context of the debate on natural law and human rights of the period), but they have declined or even disappeared. We can also assume that he refers to an organic metaphor: humankind is to be conceived as a tree with a joint and diversified root system and a shared stem, divided into larger and smaller branches. Ramsay does not specify further in what ancient period these maxims were alive, but he might be referring to ideas of a golden age, whenmankind still was pure, perhaps before the Fall of Man. The potential return of the Golden Age is a distinctive feature of Utopian thought – thus Ramsay sees freemasonry as a vehicle in order to realise a latent Utopian potential among his contemporaries. Once this is realised, all nations will be enabled to mutually increase knowledge, a very interesting statement that will be developed further below. Although cooperation between the different people is the ultimate goal, this does not imply renouncing the “spot where [they were] born”, the homeland. Parallel to Anderson, Ramsay subsequently constructs a historical basis for his cosmopolitan approach to freemasonry, calling the Crusaders of the Middle Ages its “ancestors”:


“Our ancestors, the Crusaders, gathered from all parts of Christendom in the Holy Land, wanted


to unite thus in an only Fraternity the subjects of all nations […] with the aim to “form in the course of time a spiritual nation where, without departing from the various duties which the difference between the States demands, a new people will be created who, getting from several nations, will cement them


9 The Scientific magazine, and Freemason’s repository 1797, p. 35. 10 Christer Jönsson, Sven Tägil, Gunnar Törnqvist, Organizing European Space (London: Sage, 2003), p. 14. 11 The Scientific magazine, and Freemason’s repository 1797, p. 35.


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