Harold J. Laski: “The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth.”

The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past as the very institutions it came to condemn.

But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what is its nature?

Where mistakes are made, where there is corruption, or dishonesty, or abuse, it can be brought home forthwith to its authors.

The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism.