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Rh in altering their arrangements, are innumerable; but notwithstanding all their industry and learning, it would be very difficult to name any class of writers, whose labours have been of less utility to the world. The same ideas are constantly recurring in an eternal circle; the opinions of Grotius and of Puffendorff, where they are at all equivocal, are anxiously investigated, and sometimes involved in additional obscurity; while, in the meantime, the science of Natural Jurisprudence never advances one single step; but, notwithstanding its recent birth, seems already sunk into a state of dotage.

In perusing the systems now referred to, it is impossible not to feel a very painful dissatisfaction, from the difficulty of ascertaining the precise object aimed at by the authors. So vague and indeterminate is the general scope of their researches, that not only are different views of the subject taken by different writers, but even by the same writer in different parts of his work;—a circumstance which, of itself, sufficiently accounts for the slender additions they have made to the stock of useful knowledge; and which is the real source of that chaos of heterogeneous discussions, through which the reader is perpetually forced to fight his way. A distinct conception of these different views will be found to throw more light than might at first be expected on the subsequent history of Moral and of Political science; and I shall therefore endeavour, as accurately as I can, to disentangle and separate them from each other, at the risk perhaps of incurring, from some readers, the charge of prolixity. The most important of them may, I apprehend, be referred to one or other of the following heads:

1. Among the different ideas which have been formed of Natural Jurisprudence, one of the most common (particularly in the earlier systems) supposes its object to be—To lay down those rules of justice which would be binding on men living in a social state, without any positive institutions; or (as it is frequently called by writers on this subject), living together in a state of nature. This idea of the province of Jurisprudence seems to have been uppermost in the mind of Grotius, in various parts of his treatise.

To this speculation about the state of nature, Grotius was manifestly led by his laudable anxiety to counteract the attempts then recently made to undermine the foundations of morality. That moral distinctions are created entirely by the arbitrary and revealed will