philosopher, Plato, in his “Minos,” determined that Νόμος, a law, is not δόγμα πόλεως, any arbitrary decree of a city or supreme governors; because there may be unjust decrees, which, therefore, are no laws, but the _invention of that which_ IS, or what is absolutely or immutably just in its own nature; though it be very true also that the arbitrary constitutions of those that have the lawful authority of commanding when they are not materially unjust, are laws also in a secondary sense, by virtue of that natural and immutable justice or law that requires political order to be observed. But I have not taken all this pains only to confute scepticism or fantasticism, or merely to defend or corroborate our argument for the immutable nature of the just and unjust; but also for some other weighty purposes that are very much conducing to the business we have in hand. And first of all, that the soul is not a mere _tabula rasa_, a naked and passive thing, which has no innate furniture or activity of its own, nor anything at all in it but what was impressed on it from without; for, if it were so, then there could not possibly be any such thing as moral good and evil, just and unjust, forasmuch as these differences do not arise merely from outward objects or from the impresses which they make upon us by sense, there being no such thing in them, in which sense it is truly affirmed by the author of the “Leviathan” (p. 24), “That there is no common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves,” that is, either considered absolutely in themselves, or relatively to external sense only, but according to some other interior analogy which things have to a certain inward determination in the soul itself from whence the foundation of all this difference must needs arise, as I shall show afterwards; not that the anticipations of morality spring merely from intellectual forms and notional ideas of the mind, or from certain rules or propositions printed on the “soul as on a book,” but from some other more inward and vital principle in intellectual beings, as such, whereby they have a natural determination in them to do certain things, and to avoid others, which could not be, if they were mere naked, passive things.’ It is instructive to compare Butler’s way of stating a doctrine substantially similar:— ‘Mankind has various instincts and principles of action, as brute creatures have; some leading most directly and immediately to the good of the community, and some most directly to private good. ‘Man has several which brutes have not; particularly reflection or conscience, an approbation of some principles or actions, and disapprobation of others. ‘Brutes obey their instincts or principles of action, according to certain rules; suppose the constitution of their body, and the objects around them.