A Treatise of the Laws of Nature. Richard Cumberland

      

      A TREATISE OF THE LAWS OF NATURE

      NATURAL LAW AND

       ENLIGHTENMENT CLASSICS

      Knud Haakonssen

       General Editor

      This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.

      The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.

      Foreword, annotations, index © 2005 by Liberty Fund, Inc.

      Margin notes have been moved from the margin of the paragraph in the print edition to precede the paragraph in this eBook, in a smaller font.

      Cover art: Portrait of Richard Cumberland used by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

      This eBook edition published in 2013.

      eBook ISBNs:

       978-1-61487-037-1

       978-1-61487-185-9

       www.libertyfund.org

      CONTENTS

Foreword

A Note on This Edition

A TREATISE OF THE LAWS OF NATURE

Dedication

The Translator’s Preface

Names of Subscribers

Two Introductory Essays

Essay I. Concerning the City, or Kingdom, of God in the Rational World, and the Defects in Heathen Deism

Essay II. Concerning the Imperfectness of the Heathen Morality; from Both Which, the Usefulness of Revelation May Appear

A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE LAWS OF NATURE

The Contents

The Introduction

       CHAPTER I. Of the Nature of Things

       CHAPTER II. Of Human Nature, and Right Reason

       CHAPTER III. Of Natural Good

       CHAPTER IV. Of the Practical Dictates of Reason

       CHAPTER V. Of the Law of Nature, and Its Obligation

       CHAPTER VI. Of Those Things Which Are Contain’d in the General Law of Nature

       CHAPTER VII. Of the Original of Dominion, and the Moral Virtues

       CHAPTER VIII. Of the Moral Virtues in Particular

       CHAPTER IX. Corollaries

       Editor’s Note

       Appendixes

       APPENDIX I. A Summary of the Controversy Between Dr. Samuel Clark and an Anonymous Author, Concerning the Immateriality of Thinking Substance

       APPENDIX II. A Treatise Concerning the Obligation, Promulgation, and Observance of the Law of Nature

       APPENDIX 1. Richard Cumberland’s Original Dedication to De Legibus Naturae

       APPENDIX 2. Hezekiah Burton’s “Address to the Reader”

       Selected Bibliography

       Index

FOREWORD

      The seventeenth century witnessed what has been called the “heroic” period in the development of modern natural law theory.¹ Beginning with Hugo Grotius, Protestant thinkers began to experiment with scholastic natural law ideas to produce a distinctive and highly successful tradition of natural jurisprudence that would come to dominate European political thought. Viewed from the eighteenth century, the success of the tradition could be, and often was, taken for granted, but such retrospective views could often conceal the extent to which the early pioneers faced real challenges in their attempts to reconcile natural law ideas with the rigors of Protestant theology. In this context, Richard Cumberland is perhaps one of the great unsung heroes of the natural law tradition. Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae constituted a critical intervention in the early debate over the role of natural jurisprudence at a moment when the natural law project was widely suspected of heterodoxy and incoherence.

      Hugo Grotius’s work undoubtedly generated a great deal of interest among Protestant thinkers, but it also occasioned a critical response that threatened to undermine the whole project. The most dangerous writer in this respect was Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes simultaneously adapted and subverted the new jurisprudence, producing a theory that would become notorious for its apparent atheism and absolutism. As a result, early natural law writers were dogged by accusations of Hobbism, the charge that behind their attempts to forge a new tradition lay the reduction of moral and political obligation to self-interest alone. Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae, with its sustained assault on Hobbes’s ideas, constituted one of the most important and influential responses to this damaging accusation. Cumberland not only produced one