Doctrine of Natural Rights 103
From all this one thing becomes, I think, crystal clear.
You cannot have the Darwinian conception of man and of
his nature and at the same time retain the democratic dogma
of natural rights. Here also you cannot have your cake and
eat it too. This Nietzsche saw clearly and the various forms
of totalitarianism have simply put his teachings into prac-
tice. But the muddle-headed philosophers of democracy
have not seen this so clearly—to their eternal confusion. It
is equally clear, I think, that when our fathers said all men
have by nature certain inherent and inalienable rights—of
life, liberty, yes, even of property—they had a conception
of man wholly different from that of modern naturalism and
materialism. By “nature” they understood a world of rea-
son created by the Divine Reason which is called God, not
the nature of mere force and unreason which science, falsely
so-called, seems to disclose. In the cosmos there is natural
law, but there is also moral and spiritual law. In this “na-
ture” there are, indeed, facts and causes, but there are also
ends and values. Even the simplest element in nature par-
takes of the eternal values of the true, the good, and the
beautiful. We can get values out of nature only if they are
there from the beginning. We can speak of natural rights
only if nature itself is the expression of reason and spirit.
This is the conception of nature and of natural rights
embodied in Pope Leo XIIΓs encyclical on labor, which has
become, so to speak, the basis of action for a large part of
the Christian world on all social and political questions. It
is interesting to recall here my own experience with this fa-
mous document. For a number of years I used it in connec-
tion with courses in Ethics and Social Philosophy, as in fact
an illustration or formulation of an outmoded conception.
At first it appeared to me, as to most of my students, ex-
tremely naïve and traditional. Gradually, as I reread it and
taught it, it came to take on a quite different appearance.