not to make void his own voluntary act, and if he does, it is injustice or injury, because he acts now sine Jure.  Such conduct Hobbes likens to an intellectual absurdity or self-contradiction.  Voluntary signs to be employed in abandoning a right, are words and actions, separately or together; but in all bonds, the strength comes not from their own nature, but from the fear of evil resulting from their rupture.

He concludes that not all rights are alienable, for the reason that the abandonment, being a voluntary act, must have for its object some good to the person that abandons his right.  A man, for instance, cannot lay down the right to defend his life; to use words or other signs for that purpose, would be to despoil himself of the end—­security of life and person—­for which those signs were intended.

Contract is the mutual transferring of right, and with this idea he connects a great deal.  First, he distinguishes transference of right to a thing, and transference of the thing itself.  A contract fulfilled by one party, but left on trust to be fulfilled by the other, is called the Covenant of this other, (a distinction he afterwards drops), and leaves room for the keeping or violation of faith.  To contract he opposes gift, free-gift, or grace, where there is no mutual transference of right, but one party transfers in the hope of gaining friendship or service from another, or the reputation of charity and magnanimity, or deliverance from the merited pain of compassion, or reward in heaven.

There follow remarks on signs of contract, as either express or by inference, and a distinction between free-gift as made by words of the present or past, and contract as made by words past, present, or future; wherefore, in contracts like buying and selling, a promise amounts to a covenant, and is obligatory.

The idea of Merit is thus explained.  Of two contracting parties, the one that has first performed merits what he is to receive by the other’s performance, or has it as due.  Even the person that wins a prize, offered by free-gift to many, merits it.  But, whereas, in contract, I merit by virtue of my own power and the other contractor’s need, in the case of the gift, I merit only by the benignity of the giver, and to the extent that, when he has given it, it shall be mine rather than another’s.  This distinction he believes to coincide with the scholastic separation of merilum congrui and merilum condigni.

He adds many more particulars in regard to covenants made on mutual trust.  They are void in the state of nature, upon any reasonable suspicion; but when there is a common power to compel observance, and thus no more room for fear, they are valid.  Even when fear makes them invalid it must have arisen after they were made, else it should have kept them from being made.  Transference of a right implies transference,