The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (NONE)

The immutable idea of right dwells in the changing positive law. All positive law is the more or less successful attempt to realize the natural law.

Concerning Locke, for example, Rommen writes, “Locke substitutes for the traditional idea of the natural law as an order of human affairs, as a moral reflex of the metaphysical order of the universe revealed to human reason in the creation as God’s will, the conception of natural law as a rather nominalistic symbol for a catalog or bundle of indivi

Common to both groups, however, though for very different reasons, was a pronounced distrust of the power and abilities of human reason in individual men. This distrust resulted from a strong reaction

Freedom is aimed at only so far as it realizes order.

decline into a mere rationalization of political interests.

The natural law has to be realized in the positive law since the latter is the application of the universal idea of justice to the motley manifold of