Natural Law
Natural law. This expression, "natural law," or jus naturale,
was largely used in the philosophical speculations of the
Roman jurists of the Antonine age, and was intended to denote
a system of rules and principles for the guidance of human
conduct which, independently of enacted law or of the systems
peculiar to any one people, might be discovered by the rational
intelligence of man, and would be found to grow out of and
conform to his nature, meaning by that word his whole mental,
moral, and physical constitution. The point of departure for
this conception was the Stoic doctrine of a life ordered
"according to nature," which in its turn rested upon the
purely supposititious existence, in primitive times, of a
"state of nature;" that is, a condition of society in which
men universally were governed solely by a rational and
consistent obedience to the needs, impulses, and promptings
of their true nature, such nature being as yet undefaced by
dishonesty, falsehood, or indulgence of the baser passions. In
ethics, it consists in practical universal judgments which man
himself elicits. These express necessary and obligatory rules
of human conduct which have been established by the author of
human nature as essential to the divine purposes in the universe
and have been promulgated by God solely through human reason.
Source: Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition
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