arbitrary enactments set up by those in power for their own advantage. We find here, clearly conceived for the first time, the idea of law as the enacted will of rational beings, and, like many ideas that, when they are old, are regarded as veritable foundation-stones of conventional morals, its first tendency was quite subversive of all morality. As laws and usage had been looked up to hitherto as the only moral authority, this doctrine of the Sophists seemed to dissolve at once all moral as well as political obligation. Man is the measure of all things. Man is the source of the laws that govern his conduct. But if order and harmony in human conduct are brought about by enactments of the human reason, may it not be that the order and harmony in nature are due to the enactments of a universal Reason? If there is a law of men, why not a law of nature? Morality is obedience to law, after all,—not, indeed, to the fickle laws of men, but to the divine law of nature. Thus the Stoics transcended and synthesized the popular view of morals and the Sophistic opposition.
In the Greek conception of a law of nature or natural law we have something quite different from the natural laws of modern science. We find here the universal, unwritten norms of conduct and the order of physical phenomena combined under the single notion of law of nature. Laws which prevailed among all nations and were acknowledged as binding by all peoples—such as the sanctity of oaths, the duty of hospitality, etc.—could not, it was evident, have been founded by any prince or city or revealed by the divinities or oracles of any particular people; they must have their source in the universal divine will and be revealed by nature to all men in their own consciousness. Such universal and unwritten laws of human conduct, as we have already seen, were widely recognized by the Greeks. Heracleitus was perhaps the first to connect expressly this divine law with the order of things in the physical world.[1] Often the two were set in opposition, and
- ↑ Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, p. 41. An early example of the concept of law in its broadest aspect is the saying of Pindar:—
Νόμος ὁ πἁντων βασιλεὺς
Θνατῶν τε καὶ ἀθανάτων
