The appeal to a Law of Nature so often made in the history of ethical speculation has furnished but a vague and elusive norm. He who makes it is apt to fall back upon the moral intuitions with which he is furnished, and to pack a greater or less number of them into his notion of Natural Law. [Footnote: See SIR HENRY MAINE'S fascinating chapters on the "Law of Nature," Ancient Law, chapters in and iv. The innumerable appeals to the Law of Nature contained in Grotius's famous work on the "Law of War and Peace" are very illuminating. ] In Cicero, Nature becomes fairly garrulous to man on all matters of deportment: "Let us follow Nature, and refrain from whatever lacks the approval of eye and ear. Let attitude, gait, mode of sitting, posture at table, countenance, eyes, movement of the hands, preserve the becomingness of which I speak." [Footnote: _De Officiis_, i, 35, translated by Peabody,] 118. THE APPEAL TO NATURE AND INTUITIONISM.--The moralists who urge us to follow nature, whether human nature or Nature in a wider sense, we may, hence, regard as intuitionists of a sort. Those who emphasize human nature evidently depend upon their moral intuitions to give them information as to its characteristics. It is intuition that paints for them their pattern. They do not take man as they actually find him; they call for the suppression of some traits, and the exaggeration of others. Nor are those who appeal to Nature in a wider sense less guided by moral intuitions. The appeal is never made without restrictions and limitations. No one dreams that the bird, the ant, the spider, the bee, can be regarded as satisfactory teachers of morals to human beings. Each may be occupied in putting in order its corner of the universe; but the order attained is not a human order, and there is in it much that is revolting to the moral judgments of mankind. Man must have a standard of his own. He listens to Nature only when she tells him what he already approves. As a form of intuitionism the doctrine of following.. nature may be criticised in much the same way as other forms. One great merit it has. It calls attention to the fact that ethics is a discipline which has no significance abstracted from the nature of man. It appears absurd to say that man ought to do what it is not in man, under any conceivable circumstances, to do. And, like other forms of intuitionism, it has the merit of avoiding that short-circuiting which may easily prove seductive to the egoist or the utilitarian. He who accepts as his end either his own happiness or that of men generally may easily be induced to take short cuts to that end, and pay little attention to moral maxims as such. He may treat lightly that great system of rules and observances by which men are guided in their relations with one another, and which prevent human societies from relapsing into a chaos.