Certainly it is well, nay necessary,
that there should be human law to bear out the law of nature: but
human law is the creation of human society in its perfection, which is
the State. Man is punished by man for breaking the laws of man,
not--except remotely--for breaking the laws of God. Nor would it be
any inconvenience, if the law of nature were in vain in a state
wherein nature never intended men to live, wherein no multitude of men
ever for any notable time have lived, a state which is neither actual
fact nor ideal perfection, but a mere property of the philosophic
stage, a broken article, an outworn speculation. Such is "the state of
nature," as identified with the extra-civil state by Hobbes, Locke,
and Rousseau.
SECTION III.--_Of the true state of Nature, which is the state of
civil society; and consequently of the Divine origin of Power_.
1. The State is deemed by Aristotle (_Politics_, III., ix., 14): "the
union of septs and villages in a complete and self-sufficient life."
The first and most elementary community is the _family_, [Greek:
oikia]. A knot of families associating together, claiming
blood-relationship and descent, real or fictitious, from a common
ancestor, whose name they bear, constitute a [Greek: genos], called in
Ireland a _sept_, in Scotland a _clan_, nameless in England.
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