[1] Hegel, _Philos. of Mind_ (E. Tr.), p. 104. Cf. defs. quoted from Green, p. 203 above.
[4] See ch. ii. above on Montesquieu and Rousseau.
This whole sphere of Right or Law, the mind as actualised in Society and the State, naturally divides itself on the principle which has just been explained, into three connected groups of ideal facts or points of view. The first, or simplest and most inevitable, of these, may be called the “letter of the law” as we come upon it most especially in the law of property--Shylock’s law--the sheer fact, as it seems, that the world is appropriated by legal “persons.”
The second, obviously conditioned by the first both positively and negatively, may be described as the morality of conscience; the revolt of the will against the letter of the law, though this was its own direct expression of itself (_e.g._ in taking things as property); and its demand to recognise as right nothing but what springs from itself as the good will.
And thirdly, there is the reality or concrete experience in which the two former sets of facts, or ideas, find their true place and justification--the completed theory, so to speak, which adjusts and explains the narrower views founded on one-sided contact with life. This is indicated to consist in “social observance,” or “ethical use and wont”; the system of working mind where the true will appears as incarnate in a way of living. This, { 260} like the others, it must be remembered, is a fact, though akin to a theory. Not only does it explain and justify the other factors, but its existence has enabled them to exist, as theirs has also been essential to it. And yet each of the three, as one aspect of society which under certain influences may catch the eye, has at times claimed--is, indeed, constantly claiming--predominance, and has thus brought into relief its own defects and the need of the complementary ideas. We will speak of these moods of mind or kinds of experience in their order, expecting a further sub-division when we come to treat of the third.
3. “Law,” then, in the directest possible sense--the minimum sense, so to speak--is the hard literal fact that it is a rule of the world we live in for things to be appropriated by persons. This is the first or minimum change of the world from mere matter into the instruments of mind, and it is a necessary change. Things have no will of their own, and it is by having a will asserted upon them that they become organs of life. In the same way, it is by assertion in external things that the will first becomes a fact in the material world. Property is “the first reality of freedom.” [1] It is not the mere provision for wants, but the material counterpart of will. Contract belongs to this sphere, the sphere of property. It is an agreement of persons about an external thing--a “common will,” but not one “general” or “universal” in its own nature like that involved in the State.