The Law of Nature: Questions and Answers
Volney, Count
Characters of the Law of Nature. Q. What are the characters of the law of nature?
A. There can be assigned ten principal ones.
Q. Which is the first?
A. To be inherent to the existence of things, and, consequently, primitive and anterior to every other law: so that all those which man has received are only imitations of it, and their perfection is ascertained by the resemblance they bear to this primordial model.
Q. Which is the second?
A. To be derived immediately from God, and presented by him to each man, whereas all other laws are presented to us by men, who may be either deceived or deceivers.
Q. Which is the third?
A. To be common to all times, and to all countries, that is to say, one and universal. Q. Is no other law universal?
A. No: for no other is agreeable or applicable to all the people of the earth; they are all local and accidental, originating from circumstances of places and of persons; so that if such a man had not existed, or such an event happened, such a law would never have been enacted.
Q. Which is the fourth character?
A. To be uniform and invariable.
Q. Is no other law uniform and invariable?
A. No: for what is good and virtue according to one, is evil and vice according to another; and what one and the same law approves of at one time, it often condemns at another. Q. Which is the fifth character?
A. To be evident and palpable, because it consists entirely of facts incessantly present to the senses, and to demonstration.
Q. Are not other laws evident?
A. No: for they are founded on past and doubtful facts, on equivocal and suspicious testimonies, and on proofs inaccessible to the senses.
Q. Which is the sixth character?
A. To be reasonable, because its precepts and entire doctrine are conformable to reason, and to the human understanding.
Q. Is no other law reasonable?
A. No: for all are in contradiction to the reason and the understanding of men, and tyrannically impose on him a blind and impracticable belief. Q. Which is the seventh character?
A. To be just, because in that law, the penalties are proportionate to the in&actions.
Q. Are not other laws just? A. No: for they often exceed bounds, either in rewarding deserts, or in punishing delinquencies, and consider as meritorious or criminal, null or indifferent actions.
Q. Which is the eighth character?
A. To be pacific and tolerant, because in the law of nature, all men being brothers and equal in rights, it recommends to them only peace and toleration, even for errors.
Q. Are not other laws pacific?
A. No: for all preach dissension, discord, and war, and divide mankind by exclusive pretensions of truth and domination. Q. Which is the ninth character?
A. To be equally beneficent to all men, in teaching them the true means of becoming better and happier. Q. Are not other laws beneficent likewise?
A. No: for none of them teach the real means of attaining happiness; all are confined to pernicious or futile practices; and this is evident from facts, since after so many laws, so many religions, so many legislators and prophets, men are still as unhappy and as ignorant, as they were six thousand years ago.
Q. Which is the last character of the law of nature?
A. That it is alone sufficient to render men happier and better, because it comprises all that is good and useful in other laws, wither civil or religious, that is to say, it constitutes essentially the moral part of them; so that if other laws were divested of it, they would be reduced to chimerical and imaginary opinions devoid of any practical utility.
Q. Recapitulate all those characters.
A. We have said that the law of nature is
And such is the power of all these attributes of perfection and truth, that when in their disputes the theologians can agree upon no article of belief, they recur to the law of nature, the neglect of which, say they, forced God to send from time to time prophets to proclaim new laws; as if God enacted laws for particular circumstances, as men do, especially when the first subsists in such force, that we may assert it to have been at all times and in all countries the rule of conscience for every man of sense or understanding.
Q. If, as you say, it emanates immediately from God, does it teach his existence?
A. Yes, most positively: for, to any man whatever, who observes with reflection the astonishing spectacle of the universe, the more he meditates on the properties and attributes of each being, on the admirable order and harmony of their motions, the more it is demonstrated that there exists a supreme agent, an universal and identic mover, designated by the appellation of God; and so true it is that the law of nature suffices to elevate him to the knowledge of God, that all which men have pretended to know by supernatural means, has constantly turned out ridiculous and absurd, and that they have ever been obliged to recur to the immutable conceptions of natural reason.
Q. Then it is not true that the followers of the law of nature are atheists?
A. No, it is not true; on the contrary, they entertain stronger and nobler ideas of the Divinity than most other men; for they do not sully him with the foul ingredients of all the weaknesses and passions entailed on humanity.
Q. What worship do they pay to him?
A. A worship wholly of action; the practice and observance of all the rules which the supreme wisdom has imposed on the motion of each being; eternal and unalterable rules, by which it maintains the order and harmony of the universe, and which, in their relations to man, constitute the law of nature.
Q. Was the law of nature known before this period?
A. It has been at all times spoken of: most legislators pretend to adopt it as the basis of their laws; but they only quote some of its precepts, and have had only vague ideas of its totality.
Q. Why? A. Because, though simple in its basis, it forms in its developments and consequences, a complicated whole which requires an extensive knowledge of facts, joined to all the sagacity of reasoning.
Q. Does not instinct alone teach the law of nature?
A. No; for by instinct is meant nothing more than that blind sentiment by which we are actuated indiscriminately towards everything that flatters the senses.
Q. Why then is it said that the law of nature is engraved in the hearts of all men?
A. It is said for two reasons: Ist., because it has been remarked, that there are acts and sentiments common to all men, and this proceeds from their common organization; 2dly., because the first philosophers believed that men were born with ideas already formed, which is now demonstrated to be erroneous.
Q. Philosophers then are fallible?
A. Yes, sometimes.
Q. Why so?
A. Ist., Because they are men; 2dly., because the ignorant call all those who reason, right or wrong, philosophers; 3dly., because those who reason on many subjects, and who are the first to reason on them, are liable to be deceived.
Q. If the law of nature be not written, must it not become arbitrary and ideal?
A. No: because it consists entirely in facts, the demonstration of which can be incessantly renewed to the senses, and constitutes a science as accurate and as precise as geometry and mathematics; and it is because the law of nature forms an exact science, that men, born ignorant and living inattentive and heedless, have had hitherto only a superficial knowledge of it.
Principles of the Law of Nature With Relation to Man.
Q. Explain the principles of the law of nature with relation to man.
A. They are simple; all of them are comprised in one fundamental and single precept.
Q. What is that precept?
A. It is self-preservation.
Q. Is not happiness also a precept of the law of nature?
A. Yes: but as happiness is an accidental state, resulting only from the development of man’s faculties and his social system, it is not the immediate and direct object of nature; it is, in some measure, a superfluity annexed to the necessary and fundamental object of preservation.
Q. How does nature order man to preserve himself?
A. By two powerful and involuntary sensations, which it has attached, as two guides, two guardian Geniuses to all his actions: the one, a sensation of pain, by which it admonishes him of, and deters him from, everything that tends to destroy him; the other, a sensation of pleasure, by which it attracts and carries him towards everything that tends to his preservation and the development of his existence.
Q. Pleasure therefore is not an evil, a sin, as casuists pretend.
A. No, only in as much as it tends to destroy life and health, which, by the avowal of those same casuists, we derive from God himself.
Q. Is pleasure the principal object of our existence, as some philosophers have asserted?
A. No; not more than pain; pleasure is an incitement to live, as pain is a repulsion from death.
Q. How do you prove this assertion?
A. By two palpable facts; one, that pleasure when taken immoderately, leads to destruction; for instance, a man who abuses the pleasure of eating or drinking, attacks his health, and injures his life. The other, that pain sometimes leads to self-preservation: for instance, a man who suffers a mortified member to be cut off, endures pain in order not to perish totally.
Q. But does not even this prove that our sensations can deceive us respecting the end of our preservation?
A. Yes; they can momentarily.
Q. How do our sensations deceive us?
A. In two ways; by ignorance, and by passion.
Q. When do they deceive us by ignorance?
A. When we act without knowing the action and effect of objects on our senses: for example, when a man touches nettles without knowing their stinging quality, or when he swallows opium without knowing its soporiferous effects.
Q. When do they deceive us by passion?
A. When, conscious of the pernicious action of objects, we abandon ourselves, nevertheless, to the impetuosity of our desires and appetites: for example, when a man who knows that wine intoxicates, does nevertheless drink it to excess.
Q. What is the result?
A. It results that the ignorance in which we are born, and the unbridled appetites to which we abandon ourselves, are contrary to our preservation; that consequently the instruction of our minds and the moderation of our passions are two obligations, two laws which derive immediately from the first law of preservation.
Q. But if we are born ignorant, is not ignorance a law of nature?
A. No more than to remain in the naked and feeble state of infancy. Far from being a law of nature, ignorance is an obstacle to the practice of all its laws. It is the real original sin.
Q. Why then have there been moralists who have looked upon it as a virtue and a perfection?
A. Because, from a whimsical or misanthropical disposition they have confounded the abuse of knowledge with knowledge itself: as if, because men abuse the power of speech, their tongues should be cut out: as if perfection and virtue consisted in the nullity, and not in the development and proper employ of our faculties.
Q. Instruction is therefore indispensably necessary to man’s existence.
A. Yes, so indispensable, that without it he is every instant assailed and wounded by all that surrounds him; for if he does not know the effects of fire, he burns himself; those of water, he drowns himself; those of opium, he poisons himself; if, in the savage state, he does not know the wiles of animals, and the art of seizing game, he perishes through hunger; if, in the social state, he does not know the course of the seasons, he can neither cultivate the ground, nor procure nourishment; and so on, of all his actions, respecting all the wants of his preservation.
Q. But can man separately by himself acquire all this knowledge necessary to his existence, and to the development of his faculties?
A. No, not without the assistance of his fellow men, and by living in society.
Q. But is not society to man a state against nature?
A. No: it is on the contrary a necessity, a law that nature imposed on him by the very act of his organization: for, Ist., nature has so constituted man, that he cannot see his species of another sex without feeling emotions and an attraction, the consequences of which induce him to live in a family, which is already a state of society; 2nd., by endowing him with sensibility, she organized him so that the sensations of others reflect within him, and excite reciprocal sentiments of pleasure and of grief, which are attractions, and indissoluble ties of society; 3rd., and finally, the state of society, founded on the wants of man, is only a further means of fulfilling the law of preservation: and to pretend that this state is out of nature, because it is more perfect, is the same as to say, that a bitter and wild fruit of the forest, is no longer the production of nature, when rendered sweet and delicious by cultivation in our gardens.
Q. Why then have philosophers called the savage state, the state of perfection?
A. Because, as I have told you, the vulgar have often given the name of philosophers to whimsical geniuses, who, from moroseness, from wounded vanity, or from a disgust to the vices of society, have conceived chimerical ideas of the savage state, in contradiction with their own system of a perfect man.
Q. What is the true meaning of the word philosopher?
A. The word philosopher signifies a lover of wisdom: wherefore, as wisdom consists in the practice of the laws of nature, the true philosopher is he who knows those laws extensively and accurately, and who conforms the whole tenor of his conduct to them.
Q. What is man in the savage state?
A. A brutal, ignorant animal, a wicked and ferocious beast, like bears and Ourangoutangs.
Q. Is he happy in that state?
A. No: for he only feels momentary sensations; and those sensations are habitually of violent wants which he cannot satisfy, since he is ignorant by nature and weak by being insulated from his species.
Q. Is he free?
A. No: he is the most abject slave that exists; for his life depends on everything that surrounds him; he is not free to eat when hungry, to rest when tired, to warm himself when cold; he is every instant in danger of perishing; wherefore nature offers but fortuitous examples of such beings; and we see that all the efforts of the human species, since its origin, solely tend to emerge from that violent state, by the pressing necessity of self-preservation.
Q. But does not this necessity of preservation engender in individuals egotism, that is to say self-love? and is not egotism contrary to the social state?
A. No: for, if by egotism you understand a propensity to hurt our neighbor, it is no longer self-love, but the hatred of others. Self-love, taken in its true sense, not only is not contrary to society, but is its firmest support by the necessity we lie under of not injuring others, lest in return they should injure us.
Thus man’s preservation and the unfolding of his faculties, directed towards this end, are the true law of nature in the production of the human being: and it is from this simple and fruitful principle that are derived, are referred, and in its scale are weighed, all ideas of good and evil, of vice and virtue, of just and unjust, of truth or error, of lawful or forbidden, on which is founded the morality of individual, or of social man.
Copyright New England Review Spring 1999
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