heir country.

SECTION THE SECOND.

OF THE NATURE OF LAWS IN GENERAL.

LAW, in it's most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of
action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action,
whether animate, or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say,
the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well
as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action,
which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound
to obey.

THUS when the supreme being formed the universe, and created matter
out of nothing, he impressed certain principles upon that matter, from
which it can never depart, and without which it would cease to be.
When he put that matter into motion, he established certain laws of
motion, to which all moveable bodies must conform. And, to descend
from the greatest operations to the smallest, when a workman forms a
clock, or other piece of mechanism, he establishes at his own pleasure
certain arbitrary laws for it's direction; as that the hand shall
describe a given space in a given time; to which law as long as the
work conforms, so long it continues in perfection, and answers the end
of it's formation.

IF we farther advance, from mere inactive matter to vegetable and
animal life, we shall find them still governed by laws; more numerous
indeed, but equally fixed and invariable. The whole progres of plants,
from the seed to the root, and from thence to the seed again;--the
method of animal nutrition, digestion, secretion, and all other
branches of vital oeconomy;--are not left to chance, or the will of
the creature itself, but are performed in a wondrous involuntary
manner, and guided by unerring rules laid down by the great creator.

THIS then is the general signification of law, a rule of action
dictated by some superior being; and in those creatures that have
neither the power to think, nor to will, such laws must be invariably
obeyed, so long as the creature itself subsists, for it's existence
depends on that obedience. But laws, in their more confined sense, and
in which it is our present business to consider them, denote the
rules, not of action in general, but of _human_ action or conduct:
that is, the precepts by which man, the noblest of all sublunary
beings, a creature endowed with both reason and freewill, is commanded
to make use of those faculties in the general regulation of his
behaviour.

MAN, considered as a cr