no personality. Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only
presents the end and the means, but does not govern; it
prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain a law. An imperative will,
the will of a superior who has the right to command what reason
dictates or approves, is essential to government; and that will
is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in nature.
So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or
government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development.
Nature is no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is
the individual man.

No doubt there is a natural law, which is law in the proper sense
of the word law; but this is a positive law under which nature is
placed by a sovereign above herself, and is never to be
confounded with those laws of nature so-called, according to
which she is productive as second cause, or produces her effects,
which are not properly laws at all. Fire burns, water flows,
rain falls, birds fly, fishes swim, food nourishes, poisons kill,
one substance has a chemical affinity for another, the needle
points to the pole, by a natural law, it is said; that is, the
effects are produced by an inherent and uniform natural force.
Laws in this sense are simply physical forces, and are nature
herself. The natural law, in an ethical sense, is not a physical
law, is not a natural force, but a law impose by the Creator on
all moral creatures, that is, all creatures endowed with reason
and free-will, and is called natural because promulgated in
natural reason, or the reason common and essential to all moral
creatures. This is the moral law. It is what the French call le
droit naturell, natural right, and, as the theologians teach us,
is the transcript of the eternal law, the eternal will or reason