dividual interest and individual caprice, it was asserted, furnished the sole foundations for existing moral and legal conventions. Guided by such teachings, the social and political bonds of Greece seemed upon the point of dissolving. In this desperate condition of affairs Socrates came forward with his keen dialectics to teach the doctrine that beneath all laws and customs, despite their variety and apparent contrariety, general rules of morality are to be found of so abstract and refined a character as to be capable of universal application, and of such essential rationality as to be intrinsically obligatory upon men as intelligent beings. His doctrine, in other words, was that, though there would appear to be inconsist encies in the rules governing the same subjects at different times or at different places, beneath these inconsistences there may be discovered common moral elements, which give to the rules their ethical validity in so far as they have validity at all. Thus was made the first deliberate attempt to seek out the pure principles of practical morality. It is true that Socrates' own work went little beyond showing the inconsistences of current Sophistic assertions, yet the doctrine which we have mentioned was there, and the positive side of the work which Socrates had begun was immediately taken up by his great pupil Plato, and continued in turn by the still greater Aristotle. From Aristotle's time to the present day speculative spirits, one after another, have continued this search for the canons of right and justice.

The existence of eternal, immutable canons of con

duct being granted, philosophers and ethicists have confidently attacked the problem of definitely determining, by pure reasoning, the prescriptions which they give. To these prescriptions has generally been given the name "natural laws." By their essential rationality these laws have been held to be binding at all times, in all places, and upon all men. As such they have of course been considered as controlling political rulers, and, conversely, as securing to the individual rights for the violation of which no justification may be offered.

During the long centuries of the Dark Ages little was added to the contributions which the Greeks had made to the world's stock of philosophic knowledge. Indeed, much that had been discovered disappeared from the learning of Europe. Fragments only of the writings of Aristotle and Plato were known, and these for the most part in corrupt translations. All philosophy became dominated by the theological spirit, and thus the Natural Law, which to the Greeks had been interpreted as the commands of Great Nature-Natura Naturans - became, at the hands of the churchmen, the Laws of God. During the scholastic period, however, though nothing was added in substance, much was gained in definiteness. The various conceptions involved in the moral philosophies of the heathen and Church writers were subjected to that keen analysis which the schoolman's sharpened dialectical skill rendered possible. This analysis culminated in the system of Thomas Aquinas, in which the lex æterna, lex humana, lex

divina, and lex naturalis were sharply and logically distinguished.

From the time of Aquinas to that of Kant is a long step, five hundred years, in fact, yet during all that time there was no change in the currently received doctrines of natural right which, for our present purposes, need be considered. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the idea of which we have spoken above, that it lies within the power of men definitely to determine and state each of the special duties which the ethical law commands, became more pronounced. It was declared with increasing emphasis that, starting with a few axiomatic principles, it is possible to determine, more geometrico, all of the special obligations under which men, as moral beings, rest. This, for instance, was the view maintained by Locke, Spinoza, and Wolff. Thus Locke, starting with "the idea of a Supreme Being infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are, and on whom we depend; and the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational beings," declares that "from [these] selfevident propositions by necessary consequences as incontestable as those in mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out to any one that will apply himself with the same indifference and attention to the one as he does to the other of these sciences."1 Spinoza went so far as to cast his ethics in the geometrical form of propositions, demonstrations, and corollaries.

1 Cf. Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism, Chapter L.

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It was as much these absurd pretensions as it was the sceptical results of Hume's reasoning, that awoke the philosopher of Königsberg from his "dogmatic slumber." Negatively the result of Kant's work was to show the utter lack in the ethical systems of his time of a metaphysic or epistemology adequate for the support of the premises upon which they were founded. Positively, the result was to transfer to the individual human reason the legislative source of moral law. The significance of Kant's doctrine in this respect has been brilliantly stated by Salmond. "In the system of Kant," says Mr. Salmond, "the law of nature, or, as he prefers to call it, the moral law, appears as the categorical imperative of the practical reason. It is not difficult to recognize under this new disguise the conception already familiar to us. Law, for Kant, as for every one else, is a command; but he expresses this in his own way by saying that it is a 'proposition which contains a categorical imperative.' That the law of nature is a command or dictate of reason was already familiar doctrine in the time of Cicero ; Aquinas and the schoolmen taught it, and from their day to that of Kant himself, it has not been rejected or forgotten. The element of originality in Kant's system is his unreserved acceptance of what is called the metaphysical doctrine of natural law. When Aquinas says that this law is the dictate of practical reason, he means primarily the reason of

1 In an article entitled "The Law of Nature," contributed to the Law Quarterly Review for April, 1895.

God, not of man-ratio videlicet gubernativa totius universi in mente divina existens. Human reason is not per se possessed of legislative authority, but is merely the secondary source of the law of nature, as being the means by which law is revealed to man. Kant, however, proclaims a new doctrine of the autonomy of the reason or rational will of man. The human practical reason is a lawgiving faculty, and its commands constitute the moral law. This

law,' he says, '. . . is a single isolated fact of the practical reason announcing itself as originally legislative.' Sic volo sic jubeo. Reason is spontaneously practical and gives that universal law which is called the moral law. From this moral or natural law proceeds moral or natural obligation, as most of his predecessors taught. Obligation is the necessity of free action when viewed in a relation to a categorical imperative of reason.""

It must not be gathered, however, from the above that Kant taught a doctrine according to which it lies within the power of each individual to create arbitrary distinctions between right and wrong. His theory is that what our reason tells us is right becomes, ipso facto, categorically imperative upon us. But in reaching its judgments our reason is, by its very nature, governed by the principle that only that can be right which accords with a principle which we can wish to be a universal one. "Act on a maxim," he declares, "which thou canst will to be a universal law."

The effect of Kant's writings was to inaugurate an