trary restraint and their powers
were not utilized in the discovery and exploitation of the resources
of nature, to which human powers were to be devoted in the succeeding
centuries. Accordingly the end of law comes to be conceived as a
making possible of the maximum of individual free self-assertion.

Transition to the newer way of thinking may be seen in the Spanish
jurist-theologians of the sixteenth century. Their juristic theory
was one of natural limits of activity in the relations of individuals
with each other, that is, of limits to human action which expressed
the rational ideal of man as a moral creature and were imposed upon
men by reason. This theory differs significantly from the idea of
antiquity, although it goes by the old name. The Greeks thought of
a system of limiting men's activities in order that each might be
kept in the place for which he was best fitted by nature--the place
in which he might realize an ideal form of his capacities--and thus
to preserve the social order as it stands or as it shall stand
after a rearrangement. The sixteenth-century jurists of the
Counter-Reformation held that men's activities were naturally limited,
and hence that positive law might and should limit them in the
interest of other men's activities, because all men have freedom of
will and ability to direct themselves to conscious ends. Where
Aristotle thought of inequalities arising from the different worth of
individual men and their different capacities for the things which the
social order called for, these jurists thought of a natural (i.e.,
ideal) equality, involved in the like freedom of will and the like
power of conscious employment of one's faculties inherent in all men.
Hence law did not exist to maintain the social _status quo_ with all
its arbitrary restraints on the will and on employment of individual
powers; it existed rather to maintain the natural equality which often
was threatened or impaired by the traditional restrictions on
individual activity. Since this natural equality was conceived
positively as an ideal equality in opportunity to do things, it could
easily pass into a conception of free individual self-assertion as the
thing sought, and of the legal order as existing to make possible the
maximum thereof in a world abounding in undiscovered resources,
undeveloped lands and unharnessed natural forces. The latter idea took
form in the seventeenth century and prevailed for two centuries
therea