life, the first law of nature is 'to seek peace and follow it'; and this involves the giving up of such rights as hinder the peace of mankind and the performance of covenants, provided we can be assured that others will do the same. Such assurance can be had only when there is some coercive power to compel men equally to perform their covenants. The only way to erect such a power is by common consent to confer the power and strength of all upon one man or upon one assembly of men. After the sovereign power is once established, it is the duty of every one to yield implicit obedience to it in all matters. The civil laws which the sovereign institutes are to determine without question the conduct of the subject. They are to him the ultimate standards of right and wrong, good and evil. It is in his making all practical morality consist in obeying the laws of the state, that we find the jural aspect of Hobbes's moral philosophy. The laws of nature which serve as a theoretic basis for his system are jural only in the mode of expression, and not at all in the concept itself. The phrase 'law of nature' was one held in high respect by jurists, ecclesiastics, and rationalists. It was, therefore, a very advantageous phrase for the founder of a new theory of the state to have continually in his mouth. Indeed, Hobbes himself is careful to state that he does not in reality attach any jural significance to the term.[1]
In the writings of Cudworth, the foremost of the "Cambridge Platonists" of the seventeenth century, we find a noteworthy opposition to jural conceptions of morality. In his view neither civil law nor divine law can determine morality. Good and evil are essentially and eternally distinct, and no mere will, not even that of God himself, can alter this distinction. Moral truths are immutable ideas of the divine reason, and, like the truths of mathematics, are apprehended by the human reason, and are, therefore, equally valid for all rational beings. In the ethics of Locke and Cumberland we find the jural concepts again regnant. Both of these philosophers treated morality as a code of laws promulgated by God, revealed in the natural
- ↑ See the close of chapters xiv and xv of the Leviathan, which he devotes particularly to the definition and deduction of the laws of nature.
