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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tax morality, and on which I shall touch immediately, the aggregate of the rules, established by political superiors, may also be marked commodiously with the name of positive law. For the sake, then, of getting a name brief and distinctive at once, and agreeably to frequent usage, I style that aggregate of rules, or any portion of that aggregate, positive law: though rules, which are not established by political superiors, are also positive, or exist by position, if they be rules or laws, in the proper signification of the term. Though some of the laws or rules, which are set by men to men, are established by political superiors, others are not established by political superiors, or are not established by political superiors, in that capacity or character. Of human laws belonging to this second class, some are laws, properly so called. But others are styled laws by an improper application of the term, although that improper application rests upon a close analogy. For such of the human laws belonging to this second class as are properly called laws, current or established language has no collective name. But the aggregate of the human laws, which are improperly styled laws, is not unfrequently denoted by one of the following expressions : " moral rules," " the moral law," " the law set or prescribed by general or public opinion." Certain parcels of the aggregate denoted by those expressions, are usually styled " the law or rules of honour," and " the law set by fashion." As opposed to the laws which are set by God to chapter{Section 4men, and to the laws which are established by political superiors, the aggregate of the human laws, which are improperly styled laws, may be named commodiously positive morality. The name morality severs them from positive law : whi...