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Aside from its political origins, the pinlosophical roots of the Declaration are deep and varied. Even though Jefferson says, "I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it," the document reflects such classical ideas as Aristotle's perception of an unchangeable natural law pertaining to all men, and the Stoics' even more explicit assertion of a natural law knowable by men and thus capable of directing them, as rational and social animals, toward perfection. Such ideas took Christian form in the minds of teachers like St. Thomas Aquinas, who accepted from classical writers the concept that there is "an inclination in man to the good, according to the rational nature winch is proper to him; as, for example, man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society." Some mysteries of heaven remained in the province of faith, but reason could bear on others and was of prime use to illuminate the mysteries of the world. And in Sir Isaac Newton's subsequent work, the next step was obvious: the entire universe is susceptible to rational inquiry.
At the end of the Middle Ages, when feudalism had bound lord to vassal as well as vassal to lord, apologists for the ever mightier monarchs of Europe increasingly used "right reason" to interpret God's will as a mandate for the divine right of kings—a sacred and descending chain of authority. In 1680, Sk Robert Filmer's Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings expressed this idea according to a metaphor of relative power: "Kings are as absolute as Adam over the creatures." A king, thought Filmer, rules his people as a father rules ins children. In 1681, the writer James Tyrrell, a friend of Locke's, replied in Patriarcha non Monarcha that on the contrary, a king is as much under the law as are ins subjects: all are bound by the social compact.
That formulation was crucial; it signified at least the intellectual end of the era epitomized by King Louis XIV of France: "L'etat, c'est moi." Locke carried Tyrrell's idea much farther in his Two Treatises of Government, written partly as a refutation of Filmer and published just after the revolution in 1688. In the Second Treatise, Locke based all political theory upon a rationally ordered universe. The thought was not impiously secular but in fact was the re-verse—a conception of human order deriving entirely from the infinite and infinitely discoverable mind of God. Yet, in effect, Locke burdened man's intelligence with an absolute freedom that implies absolute responsibility.