This rough distinction between natural and positive, absolute and relative rights; this concept of an ideal right placed face to face with real rights, or of which the real should be an imperfect and partial translation, also reappears in St. Thomas Aquinas and in other scholastics. And there is nothing more than this in those thinkers who founded what was called natural rights in the seventeenth century, such as Grotius and his followers. It is true that the boast of having distinguished rights from morality and religion has usually been attributed to that historical period. But it is hardly necessary to repeat that what was meant by these formulæ were the great social and political questions which took the form of wars of religion in the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; that so-called distinction, therefore, the result of long strife, though it have great practical value as a sign of social transformation, has no doctrinal value. The idea of autonomy, proper to the juridical activity, is absent even in the profound treatise of Vico on universal rights, for this contains only an altogether empirical distinction between _virtus_ and _justitia_; of these the first _cum cupiditate pugnai,_ and the second _utilitates dirigit et exaequat;_ and both derive their origin from the _vis veri_ or _ratio humana;_ and as all the virtues are connected and none of them can exist alone (_nulla virtus solitaria_), so _virtus_ and _justitia_ are at bottom one.[8] The work of Vico, which gives a new conception of the relation between ideal and history and most original applications of Roman history, turns out to be nothing but Ethic, when considered beneath the aspect of Philosophy of Rights. Nor on the other hand could the problem of the nature of rights truly form the object of enquiry on the part of utilitarians (Hobbes and others); with whom, if the absorption of rights in morality was not found, this did not arise because the one was distinguished from the other, but because morality itself was denied in what was proper to itself: the problem of the distinction disappeared, because its terms disappeared. [Sidenote: _Thomas and his followers._] II. Thomas provided the apple of discord, or as might also be said, cast the leaven of progress into the treatment of rights, when he distinguished three forms of the _rectum_: the _justum,_ the _honestum,_ the _decorum,_ placing the first in opposition to the other two, the _forum externum_ to the _internum,_ and attributing to rights and justice the character of coercibility.[9] The formula had a rapid and unsuspected fortune, and became current in the schools. Gundling, for instance, defined right as the "ordering of external relations."[10] [Sidenote: _Kant and Fichte._]