"Tyrrell's central axiom is that natural law is reducible to the duty to seek the common good of rational beings. His lengthy preface points towards two strands in eighteenth-century ethical thought: the hyper-rationalist insistence that morality can be reduced to mathematical propositions, and the modernized Stoicism which sought to show that morality was in harmony with both natural sociability and with the pattern of the divinely created universe" (Oxford DNB). James Tyrrell was a political theorist and historian, best known for his Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681), which advocates the principle of a limited monarchy and disputes the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. Tyrrell was also a close friend of John Locke's, and many see the influence of Tyrrell's thought on Locke's important Two Treatises of Government (P.M.M. 163). The present work is an abridged English translation of Richard Cumberland's (1632-1718) De legibus naturae (1672), which was produced with an eye to vindicating the law of nature against Hobbism. Wing T3584.