overeign 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