I. What is meant by a law.-II. Permissions are not laws.-III. In what respect they may be considered as laws.-IV. Why they have been thought to be laws.-V. Laws either natural or voluntary.VI. Cause of obligation to observe natural laws is foreign to our present inquiry.-VII. A short account of the cause of obligation.— VIII. Voluntary laws either divine or human.-IX. Divine voluntary laws.-X. Difference between law of nature and divine positive Civil law what.laws.-XI. Human voluntary laws of three sorts.
XII. Human laws of less extent than civil law.-XIII. Law of
I. A LAW* is a rule to which men are obliged to What is meant by make their moral actions conformable. The word law has indeed a much more extensive signification: all rules, from which any beings whatsoever either will not, or cannot, or ought not to deviate, are so many laws to them. The rules, which God has set to himself to work by; the rules, which brute creatures are led by their instinct to obey; and the rules, which inanimate matter in its motions and operations cannot but observe, are usually called the laws of their several natures. But since it is not our business, in the following work, to inquire into the rules, which God, before all ages, has set down to himself, for himself to work by; or into those, which the instinct of brute creatures imposes upon them, or into those, which necessarily determine the motions and operations of inanimate matter; but into those only, which men are bound to observe; it was proper, in defining the word law, to restrain it to this sense. Neither are all the actions of men subject to the natural law, which we are inquiring after; but those only, which are called moral actions; that is, those only, in which men have knowledge to guide them, and a will to choose for themselves. This is the reason for restraining the law still farther, by defining it to be a rule for the moral actions of men. It was necessary likewise to include obligation in our notion of a law, and to define
* Grot. Lib. I. Cap. I. § IX.