Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: that law must be the command of a political superior is to import into a natural science the mode of defining proper to an abstract one. The Moral Law. Besides the jural laws which we have been considering, and the laws of nature in the sense of modern science at which we have glanced, 'the moral law' is a term often used to express the obligations which are in cumbent on men in the forum of conscience. As rules for human conduct, perpetually violated, those obligations can have no connection but that of metaphor with the laws of nature in the sense of modern science, but they have so much analogy with jural laws that the question arises whether they do not form with these last a real class of the highest or most comprehensive kind, to the whole of which the term 'law' is applied with an identical meaning. In order to answer that question in the affirmative the notion of human enforcement, which accompanies all jural laws and makes by its presence the very distinction between them and rules of only moral obligation, would have to be excluded from the meaning of law in the largest extension which it can receive without going into metaphor. But the notion of enforcement by superior determination might remain, since in an enlightened conscience the test of a duty is its consonance with a moral order not to be violated without evil consequences, and such a moral order, with the consequential penalties for its breach, may be reverently regarded as imposed by a superior power. Here at last, not by arbitrary definition but by following the train of observable resemblances, we arrive at the final meaning of law. Rights and Wrongs. ' Along with law there goes the notion of a right, that is, of a claim against the person who has violated the law to our disadvantage; and he is s...
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