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• Foreword
• A Note On This Edition
• A Treatise of the Laws of Nature
• To His Excellency, John, Lord Carteret, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland . 1
• The Translator’s Preface
• Names of Subscribers
• Two Introductory Essays
• Essay I: Of the City, Or Kingdom, of God In the Rational World, and the Defects In Heathen Deism
• Essay II: Concerning the Imperfectness of the Heathen Morality
• The Introduction
• A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Laws of Nature , &c. and a Confutation of the Elements of Mr. Hobbes ’s Philosophy .
• Chapter I: Of the Nature of Things .
• Chapter II: Of Human Nature, and Right Reason .
• Chapter III: Of Natural Good .
• Chapter IV: Of the Practical Dictates of Reason .
• Chapter V: Of the Law of Nature, and Its Obligation.
• Chapter VI: Of Those Things Which Are Contain’d In the General Law of Nature.
• Chapter VII: Of the Original of Dominion, and the Moral Virtues.
• Chapter VIII: Of the Moral Virtues In Particular .
• Chapter IX: Corollaries.
• Editor’s Note
• Appendices
• Appendix I: A Summary of the Controversy Between Dr . Samuel Clark and an Anonymous Author, Concerning the Immateriality of Thinking Substance .
• Appendix II: A Treatise Concerning the Obligation, Promulgation, and Observance of the Law of Nature
• Appendix 1. Richard Cumberland’s Original Dedication to De Legibus Naturae
• Appendix 2: Hezekiah Burton’s “address to the Reader”

A NOTE ON THIS EDITION

The current edition reproduces Maxwell’s complete text, together with additional material taken from Cumberland’s copy of De Legibus, Barbeyrac’s Traité Philosophique, and Towers’s Philosophical Enquiry. The only substantial changes to Maxwell’s text are to the footnotes. Maxwell’s footnotes use a variety of conventions, but they are unnumbered and in the introductory essays and appendixes consist usually of very general abbreviated references that provide hardly any guidance for a nonspecialist modern reader.

For ease of reference, Maxwell’s footnote callouts (normally as terisks) in the text have been silently deleted and replaced by arabic-numbered footnotes for each essay or chapter. In some instances multiple references occurring close together have been rationalized into one note. In Maxwell’s supplementary essays, the notes have been expanded to include the full title of the work referred to and, where it can be identified, the edition used. Book, chapter, page, and section numbers have been left in the form of the original note. In his supplementary essays, Maxwell often both loosely paraphrases his source and quotes it verbatim in the original Greek or Latin; in those cases, the quotation is left out and only the reference is retained.

In the translation of Cumberland’s text, Maxwell supplemented Cumberland’s brief textual references (mostly to Hobbes’s works) with notes of his own. Maxwell’s comments are identified in the notes to this edition, as is material taken from Barbeyrac’s notes and Cumberland’s manuscript. Additional information is the work of the current editor. In order to facilitate comparison, references to appropriate modern editions of Hobbes’s major works have been used.