pages, 16mo, and that a monumental statue must be nude or heroically clad. It is evident that if anybody violate these laws, he may be excluded (and he was indeed excluded) from the academies of good taste, which did not prevent his being received for that very reason into the anti-academies of the independents: in just the same way as to have incurred punishments announced by the penal code is a title of admission to certain criminal societies. [Sidenote: _Extension of the concept of law._] These examples that we have selected among the most extraordinary and the most apt to scandalize, help to make it quite clear that the concept of law must be taken in its full logical extension, when we wish to philosophize about it. Among the many obstacles that philosophy meets with is a curious sort of false shame, which looks upon contact with certain arguments as injurious to the dignity of philosophy: a contact which is avoided by arbitrarily narrowing and therefore falsifying philosophical concepts. That of law especially has a tradition of _solemnity,_ and brings with it associations that must be broken in pieces. Otherwise it is impossible even to understand what are those _firm and unwritten laws_ of the gods, which Antigone opposed to the decrees of men and how they exercise their efficiency; or _the sayings of Lacedaemon,_ in obedience to which fell the three hundred at Thermopylae; or _the laws of the fatherland,_ which, with their irresistible authority, caused Socrates to remain at the moment when others counselled and facilitated his flight. Life is composed of big and little actions, of least and greatest, or better, of a very dense web of very diverse actions; and it is not a too brilliant idea to cut that web in pieces and to throw away some of the pieces as less beautiful, in order afterwards to contemplate in those pieces only that have been thus selected, cut out and disconnected, the web that no longer exists. [1] Balzac, _Le Père Goriot_ (ed. Paris, Calman Lévy, 1891), p. 85. II THE CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS OF LAWS. CRITIQUE OF PERMISSIVE LAWS AND OF NATURAL LAW [Sidenote: _The volitional character and the character of class._] The undue restrictions and empirical divisions of the concept of laws having been destroyed, if our attention be now directed to the character that has been determined as properly belonging to them, we have the means of distinguishing them from the other spiritual forms with which they are often confused, partly as the result of the metaphors and homonyms usual in ordinary speech. Laws, as has been said, are _volitional acts_ concerning _classes_ of actions. Therefore, where the volitional element or the element of class is wanting, there cannot be law, save in name and by metaphor. [Sidenote: Distinction of laws from the so-called laws of nature.]