Nature develops it as the liver secretes bile, as the bee
constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his dam. Nature,
working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops society,
and society develops government. That is all the secret.
Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond
the simple positive fact, belong to the theological or
metaphysical stage of the development of nature, but are left
behind when the race has passed beyond that stage, and has
reached the epoch of positive science, in which all, except the
positive fact, is held to be unreal and non-existent.
Government, like every thing else in the universe, is simply a
positive development of nature. Science explains the laws and
conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin
or ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world
of space and time.

These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they
only oppose theory to theory. The assertion that reality for the
human mind is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible
order, is purely theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact.
Principles are as really objects of science as facts, and it is
only in the light of principles that facts themselves are
intelligible. If the human mind had no science of reality that
transcends the sensible order, or the positive fact, it could
have no science at all. As things exist only in their principles
or causes, so can they be known only in their principles and
causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as they
really exist. The science that pretends to deduce principles
from particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of
reasoning to an order that transcends facts, and in which facts