This third theory does not err in assuming that the people collectively are more than the people individually, or in denying society to be a mere aggregation of individuals with no life, and no rights but what it derives from them; nor even in asserting that the people in the sense of society are sovereign, but in asserting that they are sovereign in their own native or underived right and might.Society has not in herself the absolute right to govern, because she has not the absolute dominion either of herself or her members.God gave to man dominion over the irrational creation, for he made irrational creatures for man; but he never gave him either individually or collectively the dominion over the rational creation.The theory that the people are absolutely sovereign in their own independent right and might, as some zealous democrats explain it, asserts the fundamental principle of despotism, and all despotism is false, for it identifies the creature with the Creator.No creature is creator, or has the rights of creator, and consequently no one in his own right is or can be sovereign.
This third theory, therefore, is untenable.
IV.A still more recent class of philosophers, if philosophers they may be called, reject the origin of government in the people individually or collectively.Satisfied that it has never been instituted by a voluntary and deliberate act of the people, and confounding government as a fact with government as authority, maintain that government is a spontaneous development of nature.
Nature develops it as the liver secretes bile, as the bee constructs her cell, or the beaver builds his dam.Nature, working by her own laws and inherent energy, develops society, and society develops government.That is all the secret.
Questions as to the origin of government or its rights, beyond the simple positive fact, belong to the theological or metaphysical stage of the development of nature, but are left behind when the race has passed beyond that stage, and has reached the epoch of positive science, in which all, except the positive fact, is held to be unreal and non-existent.
Government, like every thing else in the universe, is simply a positive development of nature.Science explains the laws and conditions of the development, but disdains to ask for its origin or ground in any order that transcends the changes of the world of space and time.
These philosophers profess to eschew all theory, and yet they only oppose theory to theory.The assertion that reality for the human mind is restricted to the positive facts of the sensible order, is purely theoretic, and is any thing but a positive fact.
Principles are as really objects of science as facts, and it is only in the light of principles that facts themselves are intelligible.If the human mind had no science of reality that transcends the sensible order, or the positive fact, it could have no science at all.As things exist only in their principles or causes, so can they be known only in their principles and causes; for things can be known only as they are, or as they really exist.The science that pretends to deduce principles from particular facts, or to rise from the fact by way of reasoning to an order that transcends facts, and in which facts have their origin, is undoubtedly chimerical, and as against that the positivists are unquestionably right.But to maintain that man has no intelligence of any thing beyond the fact, no intuition or intellectual apprehension of its principle or cause, is equally chimerical.The human mind cannot have all science, but it has real science as far as it goes, and real science is the knowledge of things as they are, not as they are not.
Sensible facts are not intelligible by themselves, because they do not exist by themselves; and if the human mind could not penetrate beyond the individual fact, beyond the mimetic to the methexic, or transcendental principle, copied or imitated by the individual fact, it could never know the fact itself.The error of modern philosophers, or philosopherlings, is in supposing the principle is deduced or inferred from the fact, and in denying that the human mind has direct and immediate intuition of it.
Something that transcends the sensible order there must be, or there could be no development; and if we had no science of it, we could never assert that development is development, or scientifically explain the laws and conditions of development.
Development is explication, and supposes a germ which precedes it, and is not itself a development; and development, however far it may be carried, can never do more than realize the possibilities of the germ.Development is not creation, and cannot supply its own germ.That at least must be given by the Creator, for from nothing nothing can be developed.If authority has not its germ in nature, it cannot be developed from nature spontaneously or otherwise.All government has a governing will;and without a will that commands, there is no government; and nature has in her spontaneous developments no will, for she has no personality.Reason itself, as distinguished from will, only presents the end and the means, but does not govern; it prescribes a rule, but cannot ordain a law.An imperative will, the will of a superior who has the right to command what reason dictates or approves, is essential to government; and that will is not developed from nature, because it has no germ in nature.
So something above and beyond nature must be asserted, or government itself cannot be asserted, even as a development.
Nature is no more self-sufficing than are the people, or than is the individual man.
