A Treatise of the Laws of Nature

• Richard Cumberland (author)
• Jon Parkin (editor)
• John Maxwell (translator)

A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, first appeared in 1672 as a theoretical response to a range of issues that came together during the late 1660s. It argued that science might offer an effective means of demonstrating the contents and force of the law of nature. At a time when Hobbes’s work appeared to suggest that the science undermined rather than supported the idea of natural law, De Legibus Naturae provided a scientific explanation of the natural necessity of altruism.