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: the laws of Solon (those of Draco being called ftsa/ioi) and then generally to laws, ordinances, particularly to fundamental laws in distinction from pyftafjta special bills, or decrees.1 § 2. Since in early times legal and moral ideas were indiscriminately combined under the general notion of customary law, we must look for the beginning of the history of the concept of law in morality, where the tendency to discriminate between the two fields of conduct first manifests itself. It is not a case of a concept developed in one sphere of life and then carried over by analogy or metaphor to another; it is rather a case of differentiation. We do not find moral and legal institutions existing side by side and then after a time the notions developed in one sphere transferred to the other. Rather is conduct as a whole ruled by one homogeneous mass of customs. The first beginning of the distinction between moral and civil law is seen in the division of custom or law into written and unwritten. /The written law, being the expressed will of the king or state, enforced by penalties, corresponds to our notion of law in the jural sense, while the unwritten law, which depended for its binding force on habit, public opinion, religious belief and conscience, answers in a general way to our notion of moral law. The unwritten law was regarded as the foundation and source of the written. The latter only is changeable, the former is original and abiding. 'This division of the law is very common in Greek literature.2 One of the earliest and most famous examples of this is in Sophocles. Antigone defies the king, who has forbidden her to bury her brother in these words: " Nor did I deem thy edicts strong enough, That thou, a mortal man, should'st over-pass The unwritten laws of God that know n...