The problem of that distinction is on the other hand relatively recent and therefore the history of the Philosophy of rights has rightly been placed not further back than the end of the seventeenth century, or not much beyond Christian Thomas.[3] Up to that time, it is not possible to speak strictly of a Philosophy of rights. Treatises of jurisprudence, of rights and of the State, in regard to what of philosophical they contained, were nothing but treatises of Ethic; not indeed because the two sciences were (as they were) materially united in the same books, but precisely because the two concepts were indistinct. The speculations of antiquity for this part also of the Philosophy of the practical have the character of ingenuousness already noted. It would be incorrect to reconstruct a moralistic philosophy from the rights of Plato, founding it, for example, upon the theory developed in the _Gorgias_ as to the eagerness to purge his punishment that should exist in the criminal, similar, in this respect, to the sick man, who knows that the medicine will free him from his disease.[4] The researches of Aristotle also as to justice (perhaps the best the classical world has left us on the subject), look upon justice in a narrow sense, as a virtue among virtues,[5] which should not intrinsically possess any greater reason for distinguishing itself from the other virtues than they for distinguishing among themselves. The pompous definitions of the Roman jurists, still the joy of schools of jurisprudence and of judges' rhetoric, have no philosophical weight and would in any case confirm the identity of rights with Ethicity, if not absolutely with the entire knowable and practical universe. There is hardly a ray of the distinction to be traced in the discussions as to whether rights exist by nature or by convention and in the concept of a _ἁπλῶς δίκαιον,_ opposed to that of _πολιτικὸν δίκαιον_ found in Plato, and more explicitly in Aristotle,[6] and rendered popular by Cicero when speaking of the _recta ratio, naturae congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna_; of rights not drawn from the Twelve Tables or from the pretorian Edict, but _ex intima philosophia_; and of rights that on the other hand are _varie et ad tempus descriptae populis,_ whence they have the name of laws _favore magis quam re._[7]