Page:Borden v. State ex rel. Robinson.pdf/11

Rh heretical inference from these general expressions than of assault, even covert, upon these great names.

It is manifest at a glance that such a law of nature, as that supposed, could have had no operation even if it had existed before the establishment of the civil state and while man was in a state of nature. Because there was then no human right for such a law to act upon, so far at least as temporal affairs were concerned; no tribunal to enforce its mandates; no individual to claim its protection. In a word, there was no place for its operation among men in their temporal relations towards each other. If then it was a law of nature at all, it was a dormant rule, which, in that condition of man's estate, could never have been derived by the light of reason from "its essential agreeableness to the constitution of human nature." Because in that condition of man there could have been no data in the human mind from which reason could have essayed so far into civilization.

Then if a law of nature it could not have been developed from its dormant condition until after the establishment of the civil state. And then the same process of reasoning that would develope it as such would devetope many other rules which would be equally authenticated, none of which, then and so developed, could in the nature of human affairs, with all due deference, be of universal obligation. Because in a state of nature there was no place for right and duty as such rules, and right and obligation are co-relative terms. Nor indeed is it at all probable that the most extensive rule that might be developed as a rule of human conduct in the civil state, either by the aid of reason, when exerted in reference to the constitution of human nature and the adventitious state of man 's being, or by direct human legislation itself, could be of universal obligation. Because in the nature of things all such must be subordinate to some inalienable rights which Pertain to man alike in a state of nature as when in the civil state, such as the right of self preservation; and consequently must put a limit to the operation of all rules set on foot by the civil state.