 The first DJN treatment of the natural state is preceded by a chapter (II.1) on the concrete importance of law. This discussion provides a bridge between the conceptual analysis of law and obligation, in Book I, and the following chapter (II.2) on the natural state, which leads in turn to the derivation of the natural law in DJN II.3. In it, Pufendorf presents a moral anthropology suggesting what kinds of moral entities, or what obligations and laws, should be imposed in view of “the natural inclinations and pursuits of us mortals” (DJN II.1.6; Pufendorf 1994a, p. 138). These reveal – especially in comparison to beasts – that humans’ greater freedom would actually be disadvantageous to them without further regulation; that is, randomized freedom, or license, is self-defeating. The argument is expectably framed by Pufendorf’s general assumption that such counterproductivity would violate the divine intention of having human actions display a certain “order, decorum, or beauty” (DJN II.1.5; Pufendorf 1994a, p. 138); however, it is solidly based as well on a description of observable human tendencies and behaviors. The latter show humans to be weak, diverse, and sometimes perverse: not only are they anxious, ambitious, envious, superstitious, resentful, vain, vindictive, and the like; but they often disagree with one another as well, even themselves; and yet (unlike other living things) they are incapable of securing their basic needs without the aid of creatures like themselves. For mutual assistance to be possible, however, and to avoid the difficulties continually generated by the traits above, human action must be constrained by laws of freedom, as it were. Without these, humans would sink below the level of brutes, whose welfare is non-voluntarily secured by physical laws, and they would remain at liberty only to disrupt and destroy one another. This sort of inconsistency in human nature was – on religious, rational, prudential, and it seems aesthetic grounds – unacceptable to Pufendorf.