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134 and transmission, and the mutual covenants of parties, which the political union alone could create;—an order of things, indeed, which is virtually supposed in almost all the speculations about which the law of nature is commonly employed.

2. It was probably in consequence of the very narrow field of study which Jurisprudence, considered in this light, was found to open, that its province was gradually enlarged, so as to comprehend, not merely the rules of justice, but the rules enjoining all our other moral duties. Nor was it only the province of Jurisprudence which was thus enlarged. A corresponding extension was also given, by the help of arbitrary definitions, to its technical phraseology, till at length the whole doctrines of practical ethics came to be moulded into an artificial form, originally copied from the Roman code. Although justice is the only branch of virtue in which every moral Obligation implies a corresponding Right, the writers on Natural Law have contrived, by fictions of imperfect rights, and of external rights, to treat indirectly of all our various duties, by pointing out the rights which are supposed to be their correlates:—in other words, they have contrived to exhibit, in the form of a system of rights, a connected view of the whole duty of man. This idea of Jurisprudence, which identifies its object with that of Moral Philosophy, seems to coincide nearly with that of Puffendorff; and some vague notion of the same sort has manifestly given birth to many of the digressions of Grotius.

Whatever judgment may now be pronounced on the effects of this innovation, it is certain that they were considered, not only at the time, but for many years afterwards, as highly favourable. A very learned and respectable writer, Mr Carmichael of Glasgow, compares them to the improvements made in Natural Philosophy by the followers of Lord Bacon. “No person,” he observes, “liberally educated, can be ignorant, that, within the recollection of ourselves and of our fathers, philosophy has advanced to a state of progressive improvement hitherto unexampled; in consequence partly of the rejection of scholastic absurdities, and partly of the accession of new discoveries. Nor does this remark apply solely to Natural Philosophy, in which the improvements accomplished by the united labours of the learned have forced themselves on the notice even of the vulgar, by their palpable influence on the mechanical arts. The other branches of philosophy also have been prosecuted during the last century with no less success; and none of them in a more remarkable degree than the science of Morals.

“This science, so much esteemed, and so assiduously cultivated by the sages of antiquity, lay, for a length of time, in common with all the other useful arts, buried in the rubbish of the dark ages, till (soon after the commencement of the seventeenth century), the 12