[64] Ancient Law, 8th ed., p. 93. [65] Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. ii. § 14 n. [66] The ambiguity of the phrase is explained in an interesting way in Sir H. Maine's account of the change from its juridical to a political or ethical meaning. In some writers it seems to have a third and still different signification. We must thus distinguish (1) the juridical meaning, originating in the Roman "law common to all nations," which had arisen through the "constant _levelling_ or removal of irregularities which went on wherever the prætorian system was applied to the cases of foreign litigants," modified subsequently by the Greek conception of ἰσότης (~isotês~). (2) The political meaning, that all men ought to be equal, arose from the preceding. But its notion of "ought" seems often to depend on an idea of the constitution of nature according to which all men are actually born equal--not only in rights, soon to be obscured by human convention, but also in power or faculty, afterwards unequally developed by education. Hence (3) the natural meaning. The doctrines of evolution and heredity have made this view seem as strange to us now as it would have done to the Romans from whom it was illegitimately derived. Yet at one time it seems to have been assumed, almost without question, that there is but little difference in the natural endowments of different men. This assumption lay at the basis of Hobbes's political theory--Leviathan, I. xiii. p. 60,--was stated in a more guarded form by Locke--On Education, § 1; Works, ed. of 1824, i. 6,--and adopted almost without qualification by Helvétius, who, carrying out Locke's metaphor of the soul as, at birth, a "tabula rasa," afterwards written over with the pen of experience, says: "Quintilien, Locke, et moi, disons: L'inégalité des esprits est l'effet d'une cause connue, et cette cause est la différence de l'éducation"--the causes of the existing inequality being afterwards stated as twofold: first, the difference of environment, which may be called chance; and secondly, the difference of strength in the desire for instruction.--De l'homme, II. i., III. i., IV. xxii.; Œuvres, ii. 71, 91, 280. (Quintilian's statement, however, is even more guarded than Locke's. Cf. Opera, ed. Spalding, i. 47.) [67] That is, when (1) the legislature accurately expresses the average feeling of all the members of the State; or (2) the legislators happen to be fully intelligent people in whom "selfishness" has taken the shape of benevolence. [68] Although, as is well known, propinquity was held by Bentham to be an independent ground of distinction and preference.--Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. iv, sect. 2. CHAPTER IV. MORAL SENTIMENT. [Sidenote: 1. A uniform theory such as psychological hedonism]