held together by something stouter than utility. Human society cannot originate and endure without mutual trust; unless people accept each other's promises and take each other's word for facts they cannot examine. Could this trust be perhaps ensured by strict penal laws against falsehood? But laws are a product of society, and this mutual trust is necessary that society may arise. It may be said, as it is by Locke, that we are dealing with a psychological process, by which men gradually acquired the habit of believing when some one spoke to them and promised to tell the truth. But in that case these men already understood the idea of a truth which by mere disclosure compelled assent without any personal teaching; and the psychological principle of habituation is transcended. The true cause of human society then is not utility, which only assists the action of the cause as its occasion, and brings it about that men, with all the weakness and poverty of their nature, and the divisions among them due to original sin, are led to extol their social nature "under compulsion of facts" (_rebus ipsis dictantibus_), in the phrase of the jurist Pomponius, quoted with approval by Vico. Objects, facts and circumstances in morality change, though morality itself does not change: and hence arises the illusion of the utilitarians, who cling to the external, confine themselves to the appearance and see the change but not the permanence. Murder is forbidden: but the approval, bestowed upon the man who when his life is threatened and he cannot otherwise save himself kills his unjust aggressor, does not imply that the moral judgment upon homicide varies; since in these particular circumstances the case is really one not of homicide but of capital punishment inflicted by the unjustly attacked person finding himself alone: a power tacitly delegated to him so to speak by society. Theft is forbidden: but the man who in order to preserve his life steals a loaf from another does not violate morality because he is exercising a right founded upon equity.