Men should live according to the laws and dictates of nature, not forgetting the claims of reason and sentiment.
The validity of this definition depends on the assumption that operations of different kinds all agree in giving the same measure of time, such allowances as experience dictates being made for changing conditions.
It is thus distinguished from arbitrary methods of appointment, either where the right of nominating rests in an individual, or where pure chance (such as selection by lot) dictates the result.
From what has before been said of his works it may be gathered that, while professedly basing his systematic arrangement of the groups of birds on their external features, he had hitherto striven to make his schemes harmonize if possible with the dictates of internal structure as evinced by the science of anatomy, though he uniformly and persistently protested against the inside being better than the outside.
Thomas Aquinas was the first theologian to describe the Church as a divinely organized absolute monarchy, whose head concentrated in his person the entire authority of the Church, and was the source of all the ecclesiastical law (conditor juris), issuing the decrees of general councils in his own name, and claiming the right to revoke or modify the decrees of former councils - indeed, to make exceptions or to set aside altogether anything which did not rest upon the dictates of divine or natural law.
