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.
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