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the work which it is in him to do, each individual must have his separate personality and "rights" recognised; he must "be a person, and respect the others as persons ($36). His "rights" mean simply the conditions postulated for proper fulfilment of his "duties." They are therefore natural only in the sense that men are born for them, not that men are born in possession of them or that there is any innate perception of them.

But to assert his personality (he proceeds) man must reflect it in external objects; for the body to be free, there must be some command over "things"; a man is not fully conscious of his personality till he has embodied it in Property. To be without property is to be without a condition on which freedom depends. In this respect all men are equal; all equally have the right to hold property (Rechtsphil., § 49, p. 85). The rationale of property is not the economic one, the satisfaction of wants, but the embodying of the Will in an external object; it involves rather the satisfaction of Ownership than the pleasure of having a larger source for supplying the appetites. In property, as distinguished from possession, the will is identified with the external object, and this makes property the object of Law. The more clearly I leave my mark on the external object the more clearly I make it my property. Even my body is more clearly mine when I acquire bodily dexterities. Land must become private property like anything else (cf. Rechtsphil., § 203).

I show my appropriation first positively by taking possession, then negatively by using (altering or consuming) the thing; property divorced from use or use from property is an unreal abstraction; and it is essential to property that the proprietor can dispose of it to another, exchanging, or at any rate in some way alienating it. This leads to contract. Real ownership enables me to dispose of a thing in its whole value, not simply in its single use but in its general power of satisfying human wants (§ 63, p. 79). Alienation is only possible of things," including particular services (as in labour for wages contrasted with selling oneself into slavery) (§ 67, cf. § 66). The slave never can contract himself out of his absolute right to emancipate himself (p. 104). Con

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tract is an agreement made by a deliberate and particular act of will between two parties, and having for its object some particular thing or service. Accordingly neither State nor Family can rest on a basis of mere contract. The State does not arise out of a "Social Contract," but is a union without which contracts are meaningless; nor is the relation of married persons one of mere parties to a contract. The notion of a common will is beginning (in Contract) to take visible shape (§ 71), but contracting persons are not, as such, in more than mere particular accidental or superficial agreement. They do not so completely "find themselves" in the matter of a contract as to escape possibility of disagreement. This disagreement brings the notion of Wrong; and men's thought is driven below the legal notions to find means of restoring unity. The disharmony may be merely a case of Civil Injury, when both parties have really willed their mutual advantage, and it is only the force of external circumstances (the irrationality of mere particulars) that has brought about the opposite. The reconciliation is not a punishment but a compensation. In Fraud, there is no longer this harmony of wills; there is disharmony both of wills and circumstances; but there is (on the part of the defrauder) an appearance of respect for the will of the other; he keeps up the form and tries for his own. benefit to produce of set purpose the collision that was in the other case produced by the chapter of accidents. He wrongs his neighbour, and this contradiction is only solvable by punishment. But, when he goes so far as to ignore even the appearance of coincidence between the wills, he wrongs the very essence of personality, and the whole body of persons; he commits crime. The criminal is one who cuts the branch that supports him; he sets his particular will against the universal element that showed itself in Contract, he wills an act which is contrary to the very principle of external manifestation of the will in act. This is an attack on personality itself, which has now shown itself to involve more than a mere external relation and to depend on a common basis of

1 This reminds us of Kant's principle of universalizing the maxim. If we all so acted, nobody would find it possible to be free.

inward worth expressed in said relation. The occurrence of Crime, whether the crime be a violation of an alienable or of an inalienable right of the wronged person, may of course simply provoke private revenge. But this does not restore the balance, for it inflicts new wrongs, the will of the avenger being to inflict wrong in his turn. Crime and vengeance are only brought to harmony by legal punishment, which treats the matter as of public not private concern; and the will operating in punishment is conceived as that of a lawgiver, identifying himself with the law and cancelling the wrong by an act that is above the passion of individuals. The crime is retorted on the criminal in punishment, because the crime was an offence against personality in the person of the criminal himself as much as in that of his victim. Thus, to procure the infliction of punishment as distinguished from revenge, we have to think of a wil identical with the law.'

But this notion of a will that is one with the law is no other than the first aspect in which a Moral as distinguished from a Legal view of actions presents itself. Law, fully developed, leads to morality; or, in other words, the notion of freedom is shown to involve not only law but morality. The legal relations involved in personality itself take us eventually to a point where merely legal notions are inadequate. What the judge is in law in his judicial capacity, all men are in their moral relations. The result of widening this view of the judicial identity of will with law is to give us an idea of a possible positive direction of life and action. Law, in the narrower sense, gives nothing but prohibitions, whereas Morality is to furnish positive duties.

But to carry us beyond the mere abstraction of inward law, contrasted with the outward and legal probibitions, more is needed than the said abstraction itself. To take

as a maxim of our acts, "Be an end and law to yourself," is to get no positive direction; it is to dwell with mere generalities. Kant's recourse to the principle, "Will nothing that could not without contradiction be thought as a universal law," does not really help us out into

2 Cf. δικαστής as δίκαιον ἔμψυχον, Arist., Eth., V. (4), 77.

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the world of concrete duties, for the contradiction (say of Theft and Murder) does not exist unless, positively, certain other principles have been already recognised, and the contradiction declared to be with them (e.g. with the principle of property, and the sanctity of human life). When the individual is (1) conscious of the meaning and scope of his act, the next question is (2) as to his chief motive in it, and (3) as to the bearing of the act on the chief good, or, in other words, its absolute value (§§ 114, 152). Mere regard for an abstract generality will supply no motive. The individual must act with a view to a law that can be realized concretely by his action; and it will not even be enough for him to avoid conflict with legal rights, as if these were all of equally supreme validity and as if the violation of property were as morally wrong as the violation of life. The individual must be conscious of his responsibility and of the need of making up his own mind instead of simply obeying a superior force. If he yields, it must be from conviction. This subjective element is indispensable in a being that is to be called moral at all (§ 107, p. 146, cf. § 112, p. 150). But it must be a really higher conception of life, not simply a protest against the legal conception of it, or else it may practically mean simple lawlessness, no advance in true freedom.

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We still want to know, positively, what is the nature of the acts which the individual is to make up his mind to do. Morality, when it is treated abstractly as adequate to the whole of life, disappoints the expectations raised about it. Duty for duty's sake" is a mere formula, which does not by itself enable man to find himself in things, and realize positive freedom. It is an abstract inward law, as "Every man has a right to do what he will with his own" may be called an abstract outward law. Yet, when we leave this abstractness, we seem to pass into the region of particular feelings, impulses, and lawless desires. Is there any way in which desires will be satisfied and the law of duty fulfilled at the same time ?

Kant had taught that the introduction of desire and feeling destroyed purity of motive; yet he did not show how reason could be its own motive as well as its own chief end. He supposed the motives to be capable of a gradual purification which was never actually com

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pleted and needed an immortal life for its accomplishment; and he supposed the coincidence of duty and happiness to be a postulate so necessarily contained in the Categorical Imperative of Duty" that it warranted us in assuming the existence of a God to bring it about. To Hegel these seem the unfortunate necessities of a wrong abstraction. Desires and feelings are to him rational, as things are, and not merely as things one day may be. A motive, therefore, is not necessarily impure because it has the element of feeling and desire in it; and moral goodness does not need to wait for a miracle in order to find itself at one with its world. The institutions for which man is born-the family, civil society, and the State —are rational and yet they enlist the feelings and desires, and they minister to well-being. In them, duties and rights are present in concrete form; law and morality are reconciled. This is what Hegel calls Social or Customary Morality (Sittlichkeit). In opposition to the ordinance of Creon, Antigone follows “ ἄγραπτα κἀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα,” a law of duty which is not an abstraction but has its source in the Family. The moral law which overcame the legal ordinance was interpreted for her by the observances of the family, with which she felt herself to be so identified that in serving it she was serving herself. The family, like the State, begins, no, doubt, in pòs Tò v, but is eventually πρὸς τὸ εὖ ζῆν ; it is a union in the first place to satisfy desire and provide for material existence, but it becomes an ethical institution, training the individual to habits of reverence and affection and labour for the common good. The consciousness of self is inseparable from the consciousness of union with others. Duties and rights are united. At the same time though moral education begins in the family it cannot stop there. There is not complete freedom without distinction of individuals, as of moral subjects who have each his or her own work in life to do, and who must not be simply absorbed in the family or sacrificed to it. The Family grows into the State, which at first indeed may be a mere group of families (181). The members of the family must pass out of the family. Though the legal relations of "persons" are not the highest element in freedom, yet they are indispensable to it (§ 177). The death of the

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