[The state of nature was taken, by numerous philosophers, to be humanity's 'natural state' before we were brought out of it into the state of laws:]

Now in the separation [of unity from multiplicity] empiricism lacks in the first place all criteria for drawing the boundary between the accidental and the necessary; i.e., for determining what in the chaos of the state of nature or in the abstraction of man must remain and what must be discarded. In this matter the guiding determinant can only be, that as much must remain as is required for the exposition of what is found in the real world: the governing principle for this a priori is the a posteriori. If something in the idea of the state of law is to be justified, all that is required, for the purpose of demonstrating its own necessity and its connection with what is original and necessary, is to transfer into the chaos an appropriate quality or capacity and, in the manner of all the sciences based on the empirical, to make, for purposes of so-called explanation of reality, hypotheses in which this reality is posited in the same determinate character, though only in a formal-ideal shape as force, matter, capacity, etc. Any one of these is very readily made intelligible and explicable in terms of the other.

[...]

But the unity itself can only proceed, as in empirical physics, according to the principle of an absolute quantitative multiplicity; in place of the many atomic qualities it can only exhibit a multiplicity of parts or relations---once again nothing but multiplex complexities of the presupposedly original simple and separated multiple units, superficial contacts between these qualities which in themselves are indestructible in their particularity and capable of only light and partial interconnections and intermixtures.

-- Hegel, Natural Law, p 425-6, emphases mine

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