be to get modern Europeans to adopt the Greek language. But the world has survived the barbarous cruelties and excesses of the ancient and the middle ages, and carried away some valuable lessons. It may be that it is about to go through a similar experience from the opposite quarter, but the result will unquestionably in the end benefit humanity. It is very doubtful if mankind can learn by anything else than examples. And so a people who are unfit for liberty, and who cannot be taught by the experience of others, may have to go back a few centuries and commence their political training anew. The experiments which are being carried on in various countries of the world at the present moment will affect the weal of untold myriads in the American and Australian continents when Europe is perhaps the most insignificant part of the globe. In the laboratory of nature the destruction of a few nations is a matter of indifference, and no efforts of an anti-vivisection league will avail to stop the suffering which must ensue. Our difficulty in passing an opinion on the tendency of events is that we do not see them as a whole. We should, as Solon advised Croesus, suspend our judgment until we see the end of all things. But the salvation of the world depends on individuals. At great crises in the world's history all seems often to depend on one man. The question every man should ask himself is-Can I be a hero if occasion demands it? And no individual can rise to the true dignity of humanity, unless he feels proud of being a man, however humble his lot. If the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist, the least in the kingdom of humanity is greater than anything in the world. But the individual must consciously live for society, and he must be proud of playing the most subordinate part in the great drama of life. Christianity made the individual christian a priest in the church. In the state it is making him a king. And if, as Plato wished, every king became a philosopher, we might almost realise on earth that the voice of the people was the voice of God. But this consummation can only be reached by a thoroughgoing recognition and practical application of the constitutional idea, whereby the greatest become the servants of the least, and no one lives for himself, but every one not only for the state, but also for humanity, and every one is ready "to lay down his life for the brethren." And as the greatest men are those who represent in their persons all that is good and noble of preceding generations, so the highest ideal of man which humanity can form is One who sacrificed Himself for all preceding and succeeding generations. LECTURE XII. RETROSPECT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LAW THROUGH THE CATEGORIES. I HAVE now exhausted the various forms which legal judgments, as historically developed, have assumed. If this development is looked at as a whole, it will be seen that as law became scientific, lawyers were empirically deducing the categories. In other words, men at different stages of legal history looked at legal phenomena from different points of view. And when the Roman lawyers gave the names of property, person, contract, or obligation, to certain relations or transactions, they were merely naming in a special class of cases the categories which logicians were discovering in a more general form, as the necessary forms of thought. If we lay the forms of legal judgments, as developed in the foregoing lectures, alongside the forms of logical judgments, we shall discover that there is a legal institution corresponding to each logical form, which may be set forth in the following table, taking them in the order in which they have already been treated : But we have discovered, further, that thought does not rest with the categories as given by formal logic. To each pair already mentioned under each class, we must add a third, as was done by Kant, when he constructed the following list of categories: I. Of Quantity: Unity, Plurality, Totality. 6 III. Of Relation: Inherence and Subsistence (Substance and Accident), Causality and Dependence (Cause and Effect); Community (Reciprocity between the Active and the Passive). IV. Of Modality: Possibility-Impossibility; Existence (Actuality) -Non-existence; Necessity-Contingency. Thus, under the head of quantity we saw that the 2 Lecture iv. 3 Lecture v. 1 Lectures ii. and iii. 4 Lectures vi., vii., ix., and x. 6 The list of categories is here given in Kant's order, which is more convenient when we are merely analysing the idea of right, for we advance from quantity to relation on the part of the individual, and from quality to modality on the part of the state. See p. 308, infra; also Critique of Pure Reason (Max Müller), vol. ii., p. 71; Caird's Kant, p. 306, &c.; Stirling's Kant, pp. 69, 193. first rude notion of right was of property in one's body. This was all a man possessed. It was property and person in one. The man's rights were regarded under the category of unity. But, as the individual progressed in his struggle for freedom, he got single rights one after the other conceded to him-the jus commercii, the jus connubii, the jus suffragii, and so forth. Man's rights were regarded as a mere quantity which could be added to or subtracted from. They were regarded under the category of plurality. But the modern conception of a person is an individual with an infinite potentiality of rights. In the modern view of personality, men's rights are regarded under the category of totality.1 In like manner, under the categories of quality, we observed that the state began by asserting its own existence, and enforcing rights as a matter of course, without considering the rights or the character of the person offending. The judgments may be placed under the category of reality (affirmation). But at a later stage it is seen there is something wrong with the delinquent. His acts are crimes, and are treated as such. They are dealt with apart from the question of reparation to the person wronged. They are placed under the category of negation. But, as But, as we have seen, every crime involves a civil injury, and every civil injury, 1It must be borne in mind that this idea of progress from lower to higher categories here sketched, does not belong properly to the Kantian system, but is the product of later philosophy |