Natural liberty

“ This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature: being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endued him with the faculty of freewill. But every man, when he enters into society, gives up a part of his natural liberty, as the price of so valuable a purchase ”

“ It is only by abridging their natural liberty, that the state can secure to its subjects the enjoyment of their legal rights—including their legal right to the remnant of natural liberty which it tacitly permits them to retain. ”

“ His eye had that gaze which so wonderfully remains with wild animals who are prisoned from the great free natural spaces that belong to them, whose birthright is a liberty of no sparrow-and-robin size, but a colossal liberty, the range of the primal world, where fences and statutes are not. ”

“ If now we run through all the differences between the natural environment and the environment created by Man, we shall see that they practically all proceed upon the theory that men must develop no longer as individuals but as a unit. All our customs and laws proceed upon the theory of liberty and justice; and upon that theory is based the original principle of property that assures to all men the product of their toil. ”

“ And again, "Those rights which God and nature have established, and which are therefore called 'natural rights,' such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws, to be more effectually vested in every man, than they are. ”

“ But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical. ”

“ Having alluded to the state of nature, it may be proper in this place to observe, that the same poetic fancies are constantly played off on “natural rights,” as on liberty and equality; whereas, the slightest reflection ought to teach us, that all society is artificial and conventional, and that no man who enters into society can any farther lay claim to “natural rights” than the law allows. Every regulation of society is so far an infringement on natural rights, if, indeed, we have any correct notion of the meaning of these terms. It is difficult, indeed, to define natural rights. ”

“ But in Assemblies that take their Authority from the Law of Nature, it cannot be so: for what Freedom or Liberty is due to any Man by the Law of Nature, no Inferiour Power can alter, limit or diminish; no One Man, nor a Multitude, can give away the Natural Right of another. ”

“ Such was, or may well have been, the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness. It is easy to see how the establishment of one community made that of all the rest necessary, and how, in order to make head against united forces, the rest of mankind had to unite in turn. ”

“ That there are certain natural rights, of which men, when they form a social compact, cannot deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. ”

“ Of the First and Second Natural Laws, and of Contracts The right of nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing anything which, in his own judgement and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto. ”

“ No one who really saw and believed in the rights to life and land, and felt their immense significance, could say such a thing as that. Let us see: Take another natural right, which is deeply and truly believed in, and whose value and weight are perceived, — liberty, for instance. That right, too, is a relation which eaeh man bears to all the rest of the race ”

“ — Among the Natural Rights of the Colonists are these First. a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can - Those are evident Branches of, rather than deductions from the Duty of Self Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature -
All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intollerable Oppression, Civil or Religious, to leave the Society they belong to, and enter into another. ”

“ The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. As yet our spirits are free. ”

“ No obstacle to the unfettered enjoyment of those rights which we possess from God in the natural law, and that are guaranteed to us in the Constitution and laws of the land—the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”

“ Within, there are the laws of human organization, without, the laws of circumstance or environment. The humanity that has intellect and scientific knowledge may, by union and co-operation, take a firm advantage of these laws or uniformities of nature and march steadily forward, controlling the forces of nature by a willing obedience to natural law.
No sooner, observe, does this control become possible than natural rights come into existence. Man rises in the scale of being to a sphere of self-direction and comparative liberty. ”

“ As long as the natural freedom of man continued unrestrained by a multiplicity of laws, every person was at liberty to build on his own lands and possessions whatever he thought proper, and not only water- but also wind-mills. ”

“ With the conviction that there existed a right of conscience independent of the State was found the starting-point for the determination of the inalienable rights of the individual. The theory of a Law of Nature recognized generally but one natural right of the individual—liberty or property. In the conceptions of the Americans, however, in the eighteenth century there appears a whole series of such rights. ”

“ Later in the nineteenth century natural law as a deduction from American institutions or from "free government" gave way to a metaphysical-historical theory worked out in Continental Europe. Natural rights were deductions from a fundamental metaphysically demonstrable datum of individual free will, and natural law was an ideal critique of positive law whereby to secure these rights in their integrity. History showed us the idea of individual liberty realizing itself in legal institutions and rules and doctrines ”

“ In short it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one or any number of men at the entering into society, to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights when the great end of civil government from the very nature of its institution is for the support, protection and defence of those very rights: the principal of which as is before observed, are life liberty and property. ”

“ Even this life is regulated by natural conditions, but it is the goal of man, who is a free being, to overcome the fatalism of Nature with his free-will actions, which are the basis of morality and progress in the higher sense. ”

“ The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face instead of chopping logic in a university classroom, specifies "liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as natural rights. ”

“ It appears first, that liberty is a natural, and government an adventitious right, because all men were originally free. ”

“ If freedom demands law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment. ”

“ Laws docked of Nature are not Freedom’s joys, But just mechanical and puppet toys, Laughed at by men, who scorn their puny sway, And treat them as just made to disobey. ’Tis Love whose occult Pow’r alone conceives 136 What properties makes freedom. She receives Into her gentle bosom Truth’s mandate And guided by it learns how to create Those laws which fashion Liberty divine, And which alone from Love’s soft eyes can shine. ”

“ That this is so is proved by the fact that all a man’s natural rights stand upon one and the same basis, viz., that they are the gift of God, or Nature, to him, as an individual, for his own uses, and for his own happiness. ”

“ All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the substance, of original justice. A conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society. ”

“ Let us feel deeply how much of what we are, and of what we possess, we owe to this liberty, and to these institutions of government. Nature has indeed given us a soil which yields bounteously to the hands of industry, the mighty and fruitful ocean is before us, and the skies over our heads shed health and vigor. But what are lands, and skies, and seas to civilized man, without society, without knowledge, without morals, without religious culture? ”

“ But being dead, we are left to conjecture what the difference is. I will put the best construction upon it, and suppose, by "the laws of nature" the writer meant that physical arrangement of the globe, by which an ocean separated us from the ruling power, making the propriety of an independent government, more obvious on that account. And by the expression "laws of nature's God" he contemplated those ever springing aspirations in the heart of man, to possess all the liberty he could get, and power too. ”

“ To disseminate knowledge, and to increase virtue therefore among men, is to establish and maintain the principles on which the recovery and preservation of their inherent natural rights depend; and the State that does this most faithfully, advances most effectually the common cause of Human Nature. ”

“ And for this reason—that though Nature lays down the great constitutional laws within which man, her completest representative, must work; and though Nature as a whole formulates the main outlines of her ideal; yet man within that constitution can make his own laws, and within its main outlines may refine and perfect the ideal. ”

“ We are not the slaves of a despotic ruler, or pawns in the hand of an external player. Within the limits of Nature's constitution, the laws we obey are laws of our own making; the authority we obey is the authority which we ourselves have set up; and both authority and laws we can change in accordance with the growing requirements of the ideal which we ourselves are perfecting. ”

“ Therefore when we had shown that the rights exercised in political society were derived from prior 'natural' rights, a question would still remain as to the ground of those natural rights. We should have to ask why certain powers were recognised as powers which should be exercised, and thus became these natural rights. ”

“ Tho' the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature; if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species. ”

“ But the view in question imports more than this. When man is spoken of as "free by nature," the mode of his existence as well as his destiny is implied; his merely natural and primary condition is intended. In this sense a "state of nature" is assumed in which mankind at large is in the possession of its natural rights with the unconstrained exercise and enjoyment of its freedom. ”

“ For it is certain that all human striving must recognize the hard limits of natural law, and that any striving, no matter how intense and earnest, which is against the constitution of the world, is vain. ”

“ They can all be solved by appeals to Nature Fore, which holds up an ideal of mankind physically able to enjoy all the benefits and to conquer all the dangers of civilization. It is not looking back, but looking in and forward that reveals what natural law promises to those who obey it. ”

“ We should also have equality, which hitherto we have never found in nature. Finally, we should have a natural right which could be defined and enforced, not against men, but against nature—the trouble with natural rights hitherto has been that they could not be defined, that nature alone could guarantee them, and that against nature they could not be enforced.
If we take the other alternative and conceive of the Banquet of Life as a limited feast, then we see at once that monopoly is in the order of nature. The question of weal or woe for mankind is: what are the conditions of admission? ”

“ He has also to acknowledge what he owes to Nature, what is his duty to Nature. And that duty he has to perform and her authority he has to admit. He can retain his freedom and initiative and enterprise. But he has to obey the laws of Nature, acknowledge her authority, submit to her discipline. ”