springs of every discipline, whatever may be said by some who pronounce on matters they have little investigated. I note14 in particular a most ingenious man, who has deserved excellently of his country on many accounts, Sir Richard Steele, who declares, in the Epistle Dedicatory to Pope Clement XI, prefaced to An Account of the State of the Roman Catholic Religion, edited by himself,15 that in the Scottish academies they scrupulously abstain from every attempt to investigate the truth deeply, or make further advances in the sciences. He relies on a single argument: that there are certain dogmas concerning the weightier articles of religion, to which assent is demanded of those who are admitted to the task of teaching in our churches or academies. But it is certain that we have not for this reason ever encountered any barrier to the progress of learning, nor will we ever suspect that there can be such a barrier until perhaps someone proves that what is most conducive to making successful advances in the knowledge of truth is that we have nothing ever certain, nothing undoubted, not even in matters of the greatest importance; that the truth of what we have understood most evidently from the sacred oracles or from the actual nature of things, we ourselves call into doubt; or that we should be afraid to enable our descendants to see the truth as little obscured by the clouds of error as it is within our power to permit. We are indeed able to make mistakes, and not infrequently we do: but we know also that there can be certain truth in a judgment, by which one gives assent to things evidently perceived, even though in making a judgment one is not exempt from all risk of error in other respects. Nor do we suspect that because things seen in dreams very occasionally deceive us, therefore what we see in front of us when we are awake and which we touch with our fingers should be considered dubious or fanciful; this is because of that quality of self-evidence which easily distinguishes things received by the external senses from the fantasies of dreamers. Those who contend that certain knowledge of truth and the law of acting in conformity with it, cannot be obtained without an infallible judge, let them see what cause they serve.16
So, in my endeavor to adorn the Sparta where I was born, so far as my feeble abilities permitted, I decided not to burden my students any longer with dictates of systems of philosophical science in the received manner. It seemed to me that nothing could be more suitable for prelections in moral philosophy than this treatise of the famous Pufendorf. But as I lectured, I came across many things which needed comment or supplementation. So I imparted to my students brief notes for them to write in the margins of their books beside certain passages. At the same time I included in these annotations passages from Grotius where the arguments were treated, along with references to my Ethical Theses which I had also circulated among them;17 although these were composed principally as material for public disputation, they still served the purpose of a supplement to those parts of moral science which are touched on lightly or not at all by Pufendorf. The university printer asked me to include my comments in a new edition of Pufendorf’s treatise which he was preparing. And as most of those parts of my Ethical Theses which differed from the teachings of Pufendorf had been included in the book, together with a good deal more, it gradually developed into that lengthy commentary which issued from our academic press a few years ago as supplements to Pufendorf’s work.18 These have been at length revised and here and there augmented. I am permitting them to be published once more with the same intention as before of promoting the moral studies of young people in our universities.
I have attempted to take particular care in this commentary to deduce the obligations of the law of nature and its fundamental precepts from the existence, perfection, and providence of the supreme being;19 so that the manifest connection between moral science and natural theology would be evident to the reader; for moral doctrine is in truth the practical part of natural theology. In this way I have sought to elevate moral science from the human forum to which it has been too much reduced by Pufendorf to the loftier forum of God. I have done this particularly in Supplement I20 and in the first part of Supplement II.21 And by these means I hope that I have answered the particular or at least the juster part of the criticisms made of Pufendorf’s system by the celebrated Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in a letter that has been several times reprinted.
This letter appears among the appendices to an edition of this work [the De Officio of Pufendorf] by the distinguished Alexander Arnold Pagenstrecher, published in Groningen in 1712.22 The letter also appears in a French version, translated by the famous Barbeyrac, with his animadversions upon this letter, in an entirely new edition of his French translation of this text.23 Whether I have contributed anything toward the formulation of that more perfect system of moral doctrine whose absence the same excellent philosopher lamented in his letter I do not know; the reader must form his own judgment on the basis of those principles I have laid down at the end of Supplement II and from the method I have sketched in the appendix.24
I have tried not to overlook altogether the subjects which are normally taught in the usual course on ethics and which are lacking in the system of Pufendorf. And so I have included everything from them that seemed most useful and suitable for treatment here. I will not delay to speak now of what can be read in Supplements I25 and III26 of supreme beatitude, of the morality of human actions, and the moderation of appetite and all those feelings which the author has described in his larger work. As for the virtues and vices, Aristotle’s Ethics contains almost all that needs to be said on the subject and comprehends virtually everything of practical import in the moral doctrines of the scholastics, although it was transmitted by them in a confused and often feeble manner. We have confined our exposition on this subject to a very brief account of the ideas of virtue and vice in an observation at pp. 42–43, below, merely to dispel the inaccurate notions which are commonly bandied about on this subject and to indicate how one may recapture the basic distinctions. I thought it plainly superfluous to enter into a more particular discourse on them, as if the doctrine of virtue were entirely distinct from the doctrine of duties. For anyone who understands what he should do in life, and what he should not do, cannot be ignorant of what should be classified as virtue and vice. And if I had thought it relevant to expand upon the names of virtue and vice, I would not have devoted a separate discussion to the matter: I would have indicated instead the tendency of individual virtues and vices to obedience to or violation of the precepts.
I am not ignorant of the fact that several scholars before me have devoted their labors to illustrating and enriching this treatise of Pufendorf’s. But I had the opportunity to make use of very few of those writings in preparing this edition. I gladly acknowledge that these comments owe much to two distinguished men who preceded me in this undertaking, Titius and Barbeyrac. But I had already communicated to my pupils my opinions about the most important articles, most of it in writings much as I have presented them here,27 before I saw the Observations of Titius (and, before they were seen by anyone in these regions, if I am not mistaken), if not before they were published, and before Barbeyrac’s Annotations on either of Pufendorf’s works were published.28 When I subsequently consulted them, I was delighted that my thoughts on the legitimate reasons for requiring obedience, on the fundamental precepts of natural law, on obtaining compensation for damages, and on several other questions of importance were confirmed by the authority of such great men. I mention this here so that no one will be surprised that I do not refer to their writings when I amend Pufendorf’s text in almost the same manner as these distinguished men in works published before mine. The perceptive reader will quickly recognize that their observations have prompted not a few of mine when he remarks not only how much my work is indebted to them but how often I have defended Pufendorf’s system from their criticisms when these seemed to me to be unjustified.
Further, concerning the order of investigating the social duties, outlined in the appendix according to the various classifications of rights which belong to men in opposition to each other, I must advise you, Reader, that after I had time and again dictated my Ethical Theses in almost the same order as here and presented them for consideration by public disputation, I discovered not without particular pleasure, obvious traces of the same method in the work of the famous Ulrich Huber, in his noble treatise On the Rights of Civil Society, book II, sections IV and VI (a work I had had no opportunity to see before).29
