 Many other philosophers, encouraged also by the title of Hart’s famous essay, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals”, (1958) treat the theory as the denial that there is a necessary connection between law and morality—they must be in some sense “separable” even if not in fact separate (Coleman 1982). The separability thesis is generally construed so as to tolerate any contingent connection between morality and law, provided only that it is conceivable that the connection might fail. Thus, the separability thesis is consistent with all of the following: (i) moral principles may be part of the law; (ii) law is usually, or even always in fact, valuable; (iii) the best explanation for the content of a society’s laws includes reference to the moral ideals current in that society; and (iv) a legal system cannot survive unless it is seen to be, and thus in some measure actually is, just. All four claims are counted by the separability thesis as contingent connections only; they do not hold of all possible legal systems—they probably don’t even hold of all historical legal systems. As merely contingent truths, it is said that they do not affect the concept of law itself. If we think of the positivist thesis this way, we might interpret the difference between exclusive and inclusive positivism in terms of the scope of the modal operator: