The 11th enjoins Equity; the disposition, in a man trusted to judge, to distribute equally to each man what in reason belongs to him.  Partiality ‘deters men from the use of judges and arbitrators,’ and is a cause of war.

The 12th enjoins the common, or the proportionable, use of things that cannot be distributed.

The 13th enjoins the resort to lot, when separate or common enjoyment is not possible; the 14th provides also for natural lot, meaning first possession or primogeniture.

The 15th demands safe conduct for mediators.

The 16th requires that parties at controversy shall submit their right to arbitration.

The 17th forbids a man to be his own judge; the 18th, any interested person to be judge.

The 19th requires a resort to witnesses in a matter of fact, as between two contending parties.

This list of the laws of nature is only slightly varied in the other works.  He enumerates none but those that concern the doctrine of Civil Society, passing-over things like Intemperance, that are also forbidden by the law of nature because destructive of particular men.  All the laws are summed up in the one expression:  Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thyself.

The laws of nature he regards as always binding in foro interno, to the extent of its being desired they should take place; but in foro externo, only when there is security.  As binding in foro interno, they can be broken even by an act according with them, if the purpose of it was against them.  They are immutable and eternal; ’injustice, ingratitude, &c., can never be made lawful,’ for war cannot preserve life, nor peace destroy it.  Their fulfilment is easy, as requiring only an unfeigned and constant endeavour.

Of these laws the science is true moral philosophy, i.e., the science of good and evil in the society of mankind.  Good and evil vary much from man to man, and even in the same man; but while private appetite is the measure of good and evil in the condition of nature, all allow that peace is good, and that justice, gratitude, _&c._, as the way or means to peace, are also good, that is to say, moral virtues.  The true moral philosophy, in regarding them as laws of nature, places their goodness in their being the means of peaceable, comfortable, and sociable living; not, as is commonly done, in a mediocrity of passions, ‘as if not the cause, but the degree of daring, made fortitude.’

His last remark is, that these dictates of reason are improperly called laws, because ’law, properly, is the word of him that by right hath command over others.’  But when considered not as mere conclusions or theorems concerning the means of conservation and defence, but as delivered in the word of God, that by right commands all, then they are properly called laws.

Chapter XVI., closing the whole first part of the Leviathan, is of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated.  The definitions and distinctions contained in it add nothing of direct ethical importance to the foregoing, though needed for the discussion of ‘Commonwealth,’ to which he passes.  The chief points under this second great head are taken into the summary.