Chapter 1: About the Laws, in the Relationship They Have with Diverse Beings

The laws, in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relationships which derive from the nature of things. In this sense, all beings have their laws: the divinity (a) has its laws; the material world has its laws; intelligences superior to man have their laws; the beasts have their laws; man has his laws.

They who have said, that “a blind fatality has produced all the effects which we see in the world,” have said a great absurdity: for what greater absurdity [is there] than that a blind fatality could have produced intelligent beings?

There is therefore a primitive reason; and the laws are the relationships which are found between it and the different beings and the relationships of these diverse beings among themselves.

God has some relationship with the universe as creator and preserver. The laws according to which he created are those according to which he preserves. He acts according to these rules because he knows them. He knows them because he has made them. He has made them because they have some relationship with his wisdom and power.

Since we see that the world, formed by the movement of matter, and devoid of intelligence, exists always, it is necessary that its movements would have invariable laws. And if one were able to imagine another world than this one it too would have some constant rules, or it could be destroyed.

Thus the creation, which would appear to be an arbitrary act, supposes some rules as invariable as the fatalism of atheists. It were absurd to maintain that the creator, without these rules, would be able to govern the world since the world could not exist without them.

These rules are a constantly established relationship. Between one moved body and another moved body, it is in accord with the relationships of mass and velocity that all motions are received, increased, diminished, or lost; each diversity is uniformity; each change is constancy.

Individual intelligent beings can have laws that they have made. But they also have some that they have not made. Before there might have been intelligent beings they had to be possible. Thus, they had possible relationships and, in consequence, possible laws. Before any laws might have been made there were possible relationships of justice.