Men learnt gradually a different mode of seeing, observing, and judging. Sharp as was the mental activity of individuals in the middle ages, the impressions which were conveyed to their minds from the outer world were too easily distorted by the activity of their imagination, which united dreams, forebodings, and immature combinations with the object. Now the distinct black upon white was always at work, to give a durable, unvarying report of multitude of new conceptions upon the mutual relations of the State, and the position held in it by the individual man. How various have been the lawgivers who have dominated over the lives of individuals--the Jewish priests, the community of apostles, the Jurist schools of ancient Rome, the Longobard kings and the ambitious popes; and, again, together with laws which had originated in past ages and nations, there were the reminiscences from German antiquity--legal decisions, ordinances, codes of law, regulations and privileges. According to their decisions a man preserved or lost his house and farm, wife and child, and his property, either inherited or acquired. And just after the great war, the despotic will of the ruler, and the tyrannical power of a heartless system, had exalted itself above all law. Amid such a chaos of laws, and the suppression of rights by the power of the State, the minds of men sought a firm support. And as the Pietists demanded of the Church a worthier conception of human rights and duties, the Jurists also began, after the great war, to place the natural law of men in opposition to the injustice of despotic States, and to vindicate the reasonable law of States against intriguing politicians. Together with mathematical discipline and natural philosophy, the science of law became the laboratory in which minds were reared to ideal requirements. From them sprang a new philosophy. After the Thirty Years' War there began, in the great civilized nations, a systematic exposition of those convictions which Science, from its then standing-point, was able to give concerning God, the creation and the government of the world. The French Descartes, the English Locke, the Dutch Spinoza, and the German Leibnitz, Thomasius and Wolf, were the great exponents of this philosophy. They all, with the exception of the free-thinker Spinoza, sought to keep their system, concerning the divine rule in nature and in the soul of man, in unison with the doctrines of Christian theology.