. It belongs
to God alone to punish because of sin committed, the state can punish only
to prevent it. (The antithesis _quia peccatum est_--_ne peccetur_ comes
from Seneca.)

[Footnote 1: Natural law would be valid even if there were no God. With
these words the alliance between the modern and the mediaeval philosophy of
law is severed.]

This energetic revival of the distinction already common in the Middle Ages
between "positive and natural," which Lord Herbert of Cherbury brought
forward at the same period (1624) in the philosophy of religion, gave the
catchword for a movement in practical philosophy whose developments extend
into the nineteenth century. Not only the illumination period, but all
modern philosophy down to Kant and Fichte, is under the ban of the
antithesis, natural and artificial. In all fields, in ethics as well as in
noetics, men return to the primitive or storm back to it, in the hope of
finding there the source of all truth and the cure for all evils. Sometimes
it is called nature, sometimes reason (natural law and rational law are
synonymous, as also natural religion and the religion of the reason), by
which is understood that which is permanent and everywhere the same in
contrast to the temporary and the changeable, that which is innate in
contrast to that which has been developed, in contrast, further, to that
which has been revealed. Whatever passes as law in all places and at all
times is natural law, says Grotius; that which all men believe forms the
content of natural religion, says Lord Herbert. Before long it comes to
be said: that _alone_ is genuine, true, healthy, and valuable which has
eternal and universal validity; all else is not only superfluous and
valueless but of evil, for it must be unnatural and corrupt. This step is
taken by Deism, with the principle that whatever is not natural or rational
in the sense indicated is unnatural and irrational. Parallel phenomena are
not wanting, further, in the philosophy of law (Gierke, _Althusius_). But
these errors must not be too harshly judged. The confidence with which they
were made sprang from the real and the historical force of their underlying
idea.

As already stated, the "natural" forms the antithesis to the supernatural,
on the one hand, and to the historical, on the other. This combination of
the revealed and the historical will not appear strange, if we remember
that the mediaeval view of the world under criticism was, as Chri