individuals in a state of nature, and that these came to be devolved on a power representing all individuals, so that the state's right of using force against those men who use or threaten force against other men, is merely the sum or equivalent of the private rights which individuals would severally possess if there were no public equivalent for them. This is to suppose that to have been a right which in truth, under the supposed conditions, would merely have been animal impulse and power, and public right (which is a pleonasm, for all right is public) to have resulted from the combination of these animal impulses and powers: it is to suppose that from a state of things in which 'homo homini lupus' by mere combination of wolfish impulses, there could result the state of things in which 'homo homini deus.' 179. In a state of things in which private vengeance for hurt inflicted was the universal practice, there could be no rights at all. In the most primitive society in which rights can exist, it must at least within the limits of the family be suppressed by that authority of the family or its head which first constitutes rights. In such a society it is only on the members of another family that a man may retaliate at pleasure a wrong done to him, and then the vengeance is not, strictly speaking, taken by individual upon individual, though individuals may be severally the agent and patient of it, but by family upon family. Just because there is as yet no idea of a state independent of ties of birth, much less of a universal society from relation to which a man derives rights, there is no idea of rights attaching to him as a citizen or as a man, but only as a member of a family. That social right, which is at once a right of society over the individual, and a right which society communicates and secures to the individual, appears, so far, only as a control exercised by the family over its members in their dealings with each other, as an authorisation which it gives them in prosecuting their quarrels with members of another family, and at the same time to a certain extent as a limitation on the manner in which feuds between families may be carried on, a limitation generally dependent on some religious authority equally recognised by the families at feud.